indexTag Sort Order

[GregR]

Hi Group,

Following up on a previous post I have added an "Era" tag to my classical branch and populated it with one of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or Modern. When MS displays the Era container it does so in alpha order, at least it does on my KODI CP.

However, because I'm weird that way, I would like the container to display the contents in era order, Medieval at the top and Modern at the bottom.

Any suggestions?

TIA,
Greg

PS I know nothing about classical music, but I think some works may fall into either Classical or Romantic era. In those cases I add another Era tag so some tracks have two tags called Era. MS keeps it straight and Intelligent Browsing works as advertised. Very cool.

[antonmb]

It seems clunky, but you could just put a number or letter at the beginning of each according to the sort order you want, e.g. 1-Medeival. Or you could use the actual years of the period.

[simoncn]

(20-03-2016 17:50)antonmb Wrote:  It seems clunky, but you could just put a number or letter at the beginning of each according to the sort order you want, e.g. 1-Medeival. Or you could use the actual years of the period.

Another option is to use MinimServer's custom sort value capability. This would require you to tag each file with an EraSort tag and well as an Era tag, where the EraSort tag has values like 1200, 1500, 1600, 1750, 1800 and 1900. Adding these extra tags would be quite tedious and error-prone and might be more trouble than it is worth. if you are interested in doing this, see this section for details of how to set up custom sorting.

[GregR]

Hi Group,

Thank you both for the replies. I tried a few things and so will report here.

First I tried cheating. You can fool some Java programs with the "space" character, put a space (or two) in front of the era, it will remain in the tag and usually java will sort it with the space included but then remove it for display. But not in this case. This is a no go.

Then I tried cheating again. Since I am using utf-8 encoding I messed around with character substitution and while it did work I feel that years from now I might not remember how I did it and it's possible that I would get different results on different CPs. So this is a maybe, probably no.

The suggestion from antonmb works well and does not require an additional tag for sorting or additional MS entries. Nor does it require me to remember how I did it years from now. So this makes the short list.

The suggestion from Simon also works, naturally, and the suggestion of populating the EraSort tag with a meaningful value is also very good, as the need to use it may arise later. I can change my MP3Tag settings to display the new tags, easing the requirement for documentation. I was surprised when MS keep things straight with tracks with two Era and one EraSort tags. I looked into that.

Greg's tweak on Simons' suggestion. It seams that with an EraSort tie, MS will sort the Era alphabetically. With this in mind I gave the Medieval and Renaissance tags an EraSort value of 10, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic got an EraSort value of 20 and Modern got a SortEra value of 30. This works too, though it essentially abstracts EraSort.

So now I have three good and working strategies for sorting by era. Thank you both for the suggestions.

Greg

[simoncn]

I would prefer it if you didn't abbreviate MinimServer to MS as this abbreviation is generally used to represent the name of a large software company.

If you have two Era tags and one EraSort tag, the EraSort tag will be associated with the first Era tag.

You are correct that MinimServer sorts index list entries by the index value if the sort value is the same, so your tweak will work.

[GregR]

(20-03-2016 22:35)simoncn Wrote:  

(20-03-2016 17:50)antonmb Wrote:  It seems clunky, but you could just put a number or letter at the beginning of each according to the sort order you want, e.g. 1-Medeival. Or you could use the actual years of the period.

Another option is to use MinimServer's custom sort value capability. This would require you to tag each file with an EraSort tag and well as an Era tag, where the EraSort tag has values like 1200, 1500, 1600, 1750, 1800 and 1900. Adding these extra tags would be quite tedious and error-prone and might be more trouble than it is worth. if you are interested in doing this, see this section for details of how to set up custom sorting.

Just a follow up comment. When you suggested 4 digit EraSort tags I thought you were hedging your bet, so I tried 600 for Medieval and 1200 for Ren*. Many times a computer will sort a text field in alpha order and put 1200 before 600 because 1 comes before 6. Not so MinimServer! I guess it converts a text field into integer if appropriate before sorting. Now that is attention to detail! Awesome.

Greg