indexTag Sort Order

[GregR]

Hi Group,

Thank you both for the replies. I tried a few things and so will report here.

First I tried cheating. You can fool some Java programs with the "space" character, put a space (or two) in front of the era, it will remain in the tag and usually java will sort it with the space included but then remove it for display. But not in this case. This is a no go.

Then I tried cheating again. Since I am using utf-8 encoding I messed around with character substitution and while it did work I feel that years from now I might not remember how I did it and it's possible that I would get different results on different CPs. So this is a maybe, probably no.

The suggestion from antonmb works well and does not require an additional tag for sorting or additional MS entries. Nor does it require me to remember how I did it years from now. So this makes the short list.

The suggestion from Simon also works, naturally, and the suggestion of populating the EraSort tag with a meaningful value is also very good, as the need to use it may arise later. I can change my MP3Tag settings to display the new tags, easing the requirement for documentation. I was surprised when MS keep things straight with tracks with two Era and one EraSort tags. I looked into that.

Greg's tweak on Simons' suggestion. It seams that with an EraSort tie, MS will sort the Era alphabetically. With this in mind I gave the Medieval and Renaissance tags an EraSort value of 10, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic got an EraSort value of 20 and Modern got a SortEra value of 30. This works too, though it essentially abstracts EraSort.

So now I have three good and working strategies for sorting by era. Thank you both for the suggestions.

Greg