'Album Sort' - unexpected behaviour

[simbun]

As much for my own understanding as anything else...

@RSJ, hopefully to clarify a few things...

Unless I'm mistaken, it looks like you've:

• Copied Album to AlbumSort
• Modified to the singular form Symphonies and Nos., so that the symphonies are sorted in the correct order e.g. so that 'Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 4 & 7' comes after 'Beethoven Symphony No. 3'
• Included the Conductor after the word Symphony so that it'll sort by '%COMPOSER% Symphony %CONDUCTOR% No. X' e.g. 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 1'
  

The configuration being used is:

Code:

tagOptions: Album.sortTags={Album, Composer}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display
tagValue: Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}, album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

NOTE: If you have Composer in your AlbumSort values then you don't need it in the Album.sortTags as well.

You say that it's mostly working apart from a few exceptions, and I believe those exceptions (highlighted in the log) are because of the setting:
album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

<source-tag>.value.sort={<target-tag>} is used to tell MinimServer how to sort the values in <source-tag>, it's like saying Mon = 1, Tue = 2, Wed = 3 ...., so you can't have 'Beethoven Symphony No. 9' (the album tag) map to both 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 9' and 'Beethoven Symphony Karajan No. 9' (the albumsort tags); it's typically used for defining the sort order of tags used in Indexes (as all the unique values of <source-tag> are presented in a list), but also tags like AlbumArtist and Artist that have a one to one mapping.

So, without that configuration option you're able to have one AlbumSort value per "Album" (as defined by MinimServer as mostly a unique combination of Album and AlbumArtist).
In your case you said you use the same logic as @DavidL, so have Conductor as AlbumArtist, which means you can have:

Code:

AlbumArtist    Album                        AlbumSort
Haitink        Beethoven Symphony No. 9    Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 9
Karajan        Beethoven Symphony No. 9    Beethoven Symphony Karajan No. 9

So to get your [%COMPOSER% Symphony %CONDUCTOR% No. X] sort you would need to change your original config to:

Code:

tagOptions: Album.sortTags={AlbumSort}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display
tagValue: Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}

NOTE: This assumes you always have Composer in AlbumSort, otherwise change it to: Album.sortTags={Composer, AlbumSort}

If AlbumSort isn't always populated you'd also need:

Code:

tagValue: AlbumSort.default={Album}

This fills in the empty AlbumSort tags with the value from Album.

Hope that makes sense.