Tags used as Sort Order Only ( Feature Request? )

[sidepipe]

Hi Simon,

It sounds as though I will be able to do what I wanted once you have completed this work. As for the work of entering the tags twice my thoughts would be:

1) As long as the sort order falls back to the normal Album Artist/Artist if the additional custom tags aren't present, then this is only true for the exceptions, not for all tags.

2) Some software such as iTunes already does some of the work ( creating the "The" exception. )

3) There are plenty of scriptable tag editors which could create these tags external to the server.

Whilst I am far from an expert on tagging etc, I have quite a bit of software design experience... and my opinion is that you should keep things as simple as possible, and keep them to the function that they are intended for. IMHO it would be far better to keep the server side as simple as possible. As soon as you start building rules in to the server, you also need a million exceptions to those rules... you will have a never ending stream of "can it do this" or "it should do that!" Having said that, it's your baby, not mine

As for how iTunes handles conflicts... I believe that it doesn't try. Each album ( indeed each track ) is treated individually, so if you have two albums whose sort fields are different, they will show up in different places in the listing, even though the Album Artist ( and hence the list entry ) is the same. So, sticking with Tori Amos, your Artists listing would look like ( for example: )

The Alan Parsons Project
Tori Amos
The Art of Noise
...
Texas
Tori Amos
Travis

The two Tori Amos entries would have different albums under them based on which ones generated the particular artist list entry. As you say, this would be the fault/choice of the user rather than the job of the server to fix.