Indexing with ArtistSort

[bganthem]

Thank you so much, Simon. I’ve clearly misunderstood certain points around indexFormat. What threw me was the last sentence, and in particular the meaning of the word ‘limitation’, in the following para from the Index tag formatting section of the User Guide. It made me wonder via a double negative if the limitation also implied replacement of existing Artist tags:

“The indexFormat option doesn't replace any existing tags in the item. For example, the option WorkByTitle.indexFormat={$title$tonality$opusnumber$subtitle}
would add a WorkByTitle tag if it doesn't exist in this item. No tag would be added if the item already has a WorkByTitle tag. This limitation doesn't apply to the Artist tag.”

The second thing that confused me arose when I indeed added ArtistSort to indexTags which was forbidden – presumably because I had not deleted ArtistSort from itemTags. I hadn’t realised that the categories were mutually exclusive.

As to the handling of Artist and AlbumArtist for the Artist index and then managing the incidental compilation artists, my aim is to avoid polluting the ArtistSort index with artists who provide very few tracks (but I would want these incidental artists to appear in lists of album contents and in 'now playing'). AlbumArtist is not an important part of my structure, so it seems best generally to void its contents (moving the entries to a new field 'Performer') except where I wish to retain a generic heading for the compilation artists (“Smithsonian Folkways” in my earlier example). However, I’d like to be sure that this would work in practice: for example, will my control point Artist index read and display in alphabetical order, say, “Smith, Jimmy Trio” (derived from ArtistSort) above “Smithsonian Folkways” (derived from AlbumArtist) and omit from the index the individual Smithsonian track Artist entries (whose ArtistSort entries will be void) ?

Assuming that is feasible, I thought the following tag entries might do the job:

aliasTags – void
indexTags - Artist, ArtistSort, Date, Genre, All Artists, Composer, Rating, AlbumArtist
itemTags – Performer (may not be required)
tagValue - Artist.value.sort={ArtistSort}, Artist.value.display={Artist} (this latter display value may be superfluous)

But am I right to assume that <Artist.value.sort={ArtistSort}> is sufficient to capture by default the entries coming from AlbumArtist (which I would have to ensure were compiled in a sorted form) ? Alternatively should/could the sort value be written as either <Artist.value.sort={AlbumArtist, ArtistSort}> or <Artist.value.sort={AlbumArtistSort, ArtistSort}> ? Of course any suggestions for resolving my conundrum by other means will be welcome.

My thanks again and I look forward to making a donation.