Tags used as Sort Order Only ( Feature Request? )

[rjplummer]

You need to consider the case of multiple artists. Consider "Chester & Lester" by Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Most people would like to see this album under both "A" & "P". This means you have two ARTIST tags and two ARTISTSORT tags. But the tagging specs don't allow you to assume anything about the order of multiple tags so you can't know for sure that Atkins, Chet is the sort for "Chet Atkins" and not the sort for "Les Paul"

Also, the idea of of a lastNameFirst flag is problematic. Consider "Jerry Jeff Walker" and "Eddie Van Halen". And again with multiiple artists, how do you decide which artist(s) are affected by the lastNameFirst flag.

If you are going to use flags, I'd just suggest a word order value that would override the sort order. Hence, "Eddie Van Halen" would use 231, "Jerry Jeff Walker" would use 312, "Gladys Knight and the Pips" would use 215.

Ideally, you would store this with the Artist. For instance you could use the caret to separate the metadata from the displayable part of the tag, e.g., for the Chester and Lester example, you'd have two ARTIST tags, "Chet Atkins^21" and "Les Paul^21" and Bob Dylan and the Band would also have two ARTIST tags, "Bob Dylan^21" and "The Band^2"