Is different Album sorting per Index possible

[simbun]

I've just implemented this myself and thought the essence of it might be useful to others, so I'm attaching it to the most relevant Thread I can find.

By the time I look at a list of albums I've either selected an albumartist or have chosen to look at compilations, so I wanted two different approaches to sorting them.

• For AlbumArtist albums I want them sorted by date, then by album name so I can see them in the order the artist released them.
• For compilations I wanted them sorted by name. To take an extreme example, Now That's What I Call Music has releases from 1984 to 2020, so if all my compilations were sorted by date the majority of them would be mixed in amongst these releases.
  

To achieve this I had to create a new tag called CUSTOMALBUMSORT that contained the value 2999 (or any value higher than all the other dates in your music collection) for compilations (so they wouldn't be sorted by date) and then fill in the blanks with DATE (for non-compilations so they would be sorted by date).

Using the tagUpdate functionality.

Code:

@ALBUMARTIST=Various Artists
+CUSTOMALBUMSORT=2099

itemTags : CustomAlbumSort
tagOptions: Album.sortTags={AlbumArtist,+CustomAlbumSort,+Album}
tagValue : CustomAlbumSort.default={Date}

You don't need AlbumArtist in the sortTags, but for scenarios where I haven't restricted to AlbumArtist or Compilation it keeps the sort order consistent i.e. by date within AlbumArtist and by name within Compilations (assuming Compilations are identified by AlbumArtist=Various Artists).