Multiple Artists in Various Artists Album

[simoncn]

(18-04-2014 08:57)gnomus Wrote:  I'm a little surprised about this and I wonder if I am trying to do something unusual. (As you know I am new to this.) My intention was simply to "order" my virtual albums in the same way that I have my CDs ordered on my shelves - that is by the surname of the composer.) When I installed dBPoweramp, I found that I had the option of including a tag called ComposerSort - this did reverse the names, and I assumed, therefore, that that was there to allow for what I want to do.

I am not, however, "locked into" this way of doing this - I am just about to start ripping the classical CDs. If there is a better way of doing this than the one I have in mind then I would be very pleased to consider this. Ripping the "non-classical" CDs was tedious enough, and it seems that the classical ripping is going to be even more labour intensive.

Thanks again for your ongoing interest, patience and assistance, with this and my other queries.

I wasn't aware that dBpoweramp had the capability to automatically reverse the names by specifying ComposerSort. Given this, it is possible that there is a dBpoweramp setting to do this for Composer as well. You could ask about this on the dBpoweramp forum.

If dBpoweramp can't do reversal for the Composer tag, you could populate the ComposerSort tag in dBpoweramp and then do one of the following:

1) Use Mp3tag to batch convert the ComposerSort values into Composer values

2) Use the aliasTags property of MinimServer to use tagged ComposerSort values as if they were Composer values. The setting for this is:

ComposerSort:Composer, Composer:nil

[DavidHB]

(18-04-2014 09:37)simoncn Wrote:  I wasn't aware that dBpoweramp had the capability to automatically reverse the names by specifying ComposerSort. Given this, it is possible that there is a dBpoweramp setting to do this for Composer as well. You could ask about this on the dBpoweramp forum.

I have done some experiments on this, and I don't think that dBpoweramp actually processes the composer data into ComposerSort. What I think happens is that, if you set dBpoweramp to generate a ComposerSort tag (as described), it will then populate that tag from available data in in the on line metadata libraries that it accesses. If the libraries do not contain such data, the tag will be created but it will be empty.

You can easily test this by using dBpoweramp's tag editing capabilities to edit the Composer data; this is often necessary if you want to keep all the tags for a given composer consistent. You will find that, even if dBpoweramp has populated the ComposerSort tag, that tag does not change when you change the composer data, and normally has to be edited in MP3Tag.

I use an Action for this purpose, as previously described; details are in Post #7 of this thread. That post explains some of the complexities involved in editing names into surname first format; this is something that just cannot be done reliably 'on the fly'. It is much easier to change a conventional surname first order (e.g. 'Beethoven, Ludwig van') more easily into 'natural' (surname last) order, because the comma marks the dividing point.

More generally, I very much agree with the distinction Simon makes in having MinimServer format metadata but not edit it. True editing capabilities would require a much more complex user interface, and that is outwith the scope of a server, especially one designed to run on NAS and Raspberry Pi-type hardware.


David