Composer sorting question

[simoncn]

(04-05-2014 16:10)magister Wrote:  Hi Simon,

Thank you so much for addressing the issues of numeric and composer sorting in the new release of MinimServer.

I've read the section in the user guide about composer sorting. All my Composer entries use the 'lastname, firstname' format. If I understand correctly, in order for things to work as desired (sort by composer's last name and display in 'firstname lastname' order) I would need to add a ComposerSort field, copy the data from the Composer field, and then reverse all the entries in the Composer field. The first two operations might be done in batch mode with mp3tag, I think -- perhaps someone adept with mp3tag could post the directions. The third operation would need to be manual (???). I have thousands of files.

In cases where users have consistently used 'lastname, firstname' in the Composer field, is there no way to leverage this existing data?

As DavidHB has said, you can do this quite easily by adding either of the following to tagOptions:

Composer.reverseName.display

(if you want the reversed name to appear in the control point Now Playing display but not the index), or

Composer.reverseName.display.index

(if you want the reversed name to appear in both the control point Now Playing display and the index).

Quote:Also, a more general question: new users who follow your guidelines will leave the Composer field unused except in a few rare situations. I wonder if it would be better to fill in Composer anyway, although it's not needed under your approach. I imagine that some music software would be more likely to use Composer than ComposerSort. I'm not encouraging people to leave MinimServer -- far from it -- but we don't know how we'll play our files in the future as things change. Or a user might want to play a file on a mobile device that doesn't support MinimServer as well as on his main stereo. Maybe I'm wrong about the general usefulness of having Composer populated. But for me, at least, it's a lot easier to add tags when I first put an album into my library rather than go back and change or add things later. I don't think there's any downside to including Composer, although one must be careful and avoid misspellings or inconsistencies in names. Just a thought.

These sections in the User guide were not intended as "guidelines" but rather as illustrations of how these new features of MinimServer could be used. If a user wants to populate Composer with "firstnames lastnames" and ComposerSort with "lastnames, firstnames" as I think you are suggesting, that's fine as long as he/she is willing to do the extra manual work to maintain both these tag values.