Indexing with ArtistSort

[bganthem]

I’m a newbie to the sophisticated arts of tagging and to MinimServer and am most impressed by its possibilities, the User Guides and this Forum. But my searches have not found an answer to my particular problem.

I’ve been steadily ripping to flac my extensive library with dbPoweramp for some years, following my own logic and using ‘ArtistSort’ (with a reversed name format) as my primary index for all tracks, amending it as necessary with mp3Tag, and anticipating that this would act as the index on my control points – currently Naim, Lightning DS (for Auralic Aries) and Bubble. It was consequently a shock to discover that MinimServer reads ‘AlbumArtist’ rather than ‘Artist’ to compile the ‘indexFormat’.

I’ve looked at various ways, with different labour intensities, of correcting this but each one seems to have a downside given that I don’t want to:

(a) lose or overwrite the AlbumArtist field;
(b) modify the Artist and ArtistSort tags in my server library (as indexFormat would threaten to do, as well as possibly impose some delay in control point processing).

What I wish to achieve on my control points (but recognising that Lighting DS will probably not allow this owing to its (irritating) pre-loading system) is:

(1) An indexed list of artists in ArtistSort order. (I’ve tried in aliasTags <All Artists:ArtistSort> but it has no effect in Bubble and unfortunately I’m remote from my Naim renderers. Likewise in tagValue <Artist.value.sort={ArtistSort}, Artist.value.display={ArtistSort})>.
(2) Preservation of the AlbumArtist data (though this could be re-assigned to a new field – e.g. Performer) as a means of managing multi-artist Compilations. I generally wish to avoid having each compilation track artist appear in the Artist index though there would be exceptions to that rule, but I would want the track artist to appear against the title of individual tracks within albums. So, for example, a Smithsonian Folkways compilation would show Smithsonian Folkways in the Artist index while the tracks would display the title and individual artist.

Presently my configuration reads:
aliasTags - All Artists:ArtistSort
indexTags - Artist, Date, Genre, All Artists, Composer, Rating, AlbumArtist
itemTags – ArtistSort
tagOptions - Album.sortTags={Album, +Date}
tagValue - Artist.value.sort={ArtistSort}, Artist.value.display={ArtistSort}

I’d be most grateful for any advice on how I can achieve my basic aims. Equally if my underpinning ArtistSort index is fundamentally flawed, how might I best revisit it? Until I get this right I can’t proceed to the other refinements I have in mind - and it's driving me nuts!

Many thanks.