Tags used as Sort Order Only ( Feature Request? )

[rjplummer]

Thanks for the prompt reply:

(11-07-2013 09:30)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks very much for these comments and suggestions. See my responses inline below.

(11-07-2013 06:20)rjplummer Wrote:  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"

I don't think this is correct. Multiple tags have a well-defined order, based on which tag is placed first in the file. Tagging programs and music servers should respect this order.

This is, in fact, true. There don't even need to be the same number of ARTIST and ARTISTSORT tags, e.g., one could take "Love with Arthur Lee" and have ARTIST tags "Love" and "Arthur Lee" and only supply a "Lee, Arthur" ARTISTSORT tag.

Quote:

Quote: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.

This flag would be a configuration setting that applies to all tagged artist names.

If this isn't a tag within the file, it's usefulness is quite limited.

Quote:

Quote: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.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't see much advantage over specifying a sort value string that is different from the display value string.

It depends. It allows better data integrity, e.g., one doesn't have to worry about typos in one field and not the other. And minor changes to the ARTIST tag, e.g., correcting typos, wouldn't require sort order changes

Quote:

Quote: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"

I'm not too keen on the idea of adding this sorting information to the main ARTIST tag. I think it would be better to put it in an ARTISTSORT tag (or tags).

This part of the suggestion is solely to deal with the lack of a requirement that the number and order of ARTIST and ARTISTSORT tags must match. My suggestion in this respect isn't very practical since the spec doesn't support additional data in the ARTIST tag, though there's some support for tags with extra data, e.g., the ID3 SYLT tag.