Mutliple Artists Sort Values

[simbun]

Out of curiosity I tried it with some FLAC files.

Given MinimServer maps Artist to ArtistSort based on position, you'd need to create empty tags (if your tagging tool and file format supports it) where appropriate to maintain that relationship e.g. if Artist B had a sort value of B it wouldn't need to be specified, but to ensure that Artist C mapped to its sort value of A you'd still need to create an empty tag for B (which is possible in foobar and Mp3tag):

Code:

Artist:     A; B; C
ArtistSort: C;  ; A

To test I used the following data:
Track 1

Code:

Artist:     A;B; C;D; F; G;H
ArtistSort: B;A; D;C;  ; H;G

Track 2

Code:

Artist: E

Track 3

Code:

Artist: A

I was expecting an order of : B, A, D, C, E, F, H, G
I got: B, A, D, C, E, G, F, H

It looks like MinimServer (or the library that reads the metadata) ignores empty tags, so Artist F was attributed a sort value of H, then G -> G and H -> H (as it wasn't specified).

You could possibly work around that by placing all the artists that don't need a sort value at the end of any multi-value tags (I haven't tried that) but it starts to get really messy.

Personally I always supply Sort values.