Sort by Album Artist

[dav1129]

(28-09-2019 08:45)simoncn Wrote:  I downloaded Helium to try this and it appears that it shows the tagged DATE value as Rec. Year. This should work OK with the default MinimServer settings.

It doesn't.

I experimented. With a value for both REL and REC year, the tracks and album show as Unknown when sorted by date.

To cross check I downloaded a random editor called TagScanner (not as flash as Helium but works quote well) and those same files showed no value in the YEAR field.

Next I saved a random value in the YEAR field using TagScanner and those files and album then sorted correctly in Minim Server after a Rescan

When I then checked back in Helium yes, that random year showed under REC YEAR.

But for some reason files tagged using HELIUM with REC YEAR show as YEAR unknown when sorted by DATE.

This is the last email replay from HELIUM's author which is a bit too technical for me until perhaps such time as I have time to try as and decipher it.

Hi David,

Thanks for sharing the files.
I have analysed them both using Helium and a Hex-editor and I found out the following:

1) The file that MinimServer could read year for had the following tags:
-ID3v2.3 with a TYER field and a TDRL field (TDRL = ID3v2.4 recommended field, TYER = obsolete)
-ID3v1.0 without year set
​
2) The file that MinimServer not could read tags for had the following tags:
-ID3v2.4 with a TYER field and a TDRL field
-ID3v1.0 with year set

This leads me to the following conclusion that MinimServer most likely:
1) Does not read ID3v2.4 tags
2) Does not fallback to ID3v1.0 (which is really odd)

What you can try in Helium is what I earlier described, enabling saving of ID3v2 tags as ID3v2.3 from Tools > Options > General (Save ID3v2.x tags as version 2.3)
Using ID3v2.3 will prevent you from using certain fields when tagging, so my best recommendation is that you take contact with the developers of MinimServer and present the above information for them and ask them:
1) If they support only "pure" ID3v2.3
2) Why not ID3v1 is used as a fallback when populated.