tagOptions?

[solanum]

I recently bought a license for MinimServer 2 and am now trying to get it set up as I wish. I've had a look at the user guide and some posts on this forum and just can't quite get things as I wish. Hopefully people don't mind if I post the question here rather than trying forever to do it myself!

At present:
"tagOptions" are: "Album.sortTags={Album, Artist}, all.ignore.sort={The}, Composer.reverseName.display, Composer.reverseName.index"
"indexTags" are: "Genre, Artist, Composer, #AudioQuality"
"itemTags" are: "AlbumArtist"

1. Classical music. I want to sort this by composer surname first, album title second.

Originally my composer tags were "firstname surname", but it seems that won't let me do what I want, so I have changed (some of) them to "surname, firstname". However, even with the above tag options, everything seems to sort by firstname. Note that I have "Artist" tagged with composer "firstname surname" and album artist tagged with "composer; soloists, conductor, orchestra".

2. Other music (rock etc.). I want to sort by artist name (excluding "The") first, album name second.

For some reason, an initial "The" is not ignored. In BubbleDS at least it is sorted artist then album. In Kazoo it is sorted by album name. I don't know why the two differ.

Finally, is there some way to have classical and rock music sorted as above when I simply select all albums link from the respective genre, or will I always have to go to composer (in classical) and/or artist (in rock) to get the behaviour I want?

Top level:

1. Genre
2. Artist
3. Composer
4. #AudioQuality
   

Second level:

1. albums
2. artist
3. composer
4. #AudioQuality
   

Classical albums:
Sorted by composer surname then album name (display is artist).

Rock/pop albums:
Sorted by artist (excluding initial 'The'), then album name.

Any tips gratefully accepted!

[simoncn]

Welcome to the MinimServer forum!

You can't have different Album.sortTags settings for classical albums and rock albums. What you can do is create a new tag (let's say AlbumOrder but any name is fine) and populate it from either your Composer tag (for classical) or your Artist tag (for rock). To do this, add AlbumOrder to itemTags and put the following in tagValue:

AlbumOrder.default={Composer, Artist}

This will set the AlbumOrder value to the Composer value if there is a Composer tag (your classical albums) or to Artist if there is no Composer tag (your rock albums).

Now you can set sortTags to:

Album.sortTags= {AlbumOrder, Album}

and you should get what you want if all your Composer tags are tagged as lastname, firstname.

Also, you should change:

Composer.reverseName.display, Composer.reverseName.index

to:

Composer.reverseName.display.index

as your second setting (reverseName.index) is currently overriding your first setting (reverseName.display).

Putting this all together, you would have:

indexTags: Genre, Artist, Composer, #AudioQuality
itemTags: AlbumOrder
tagOptions: Album.sortTags={AlbumOrder, Album}, all.ignore.sort={The}, Composer.reverseName.display.index
tagValue: AlbumOrder.default={Composer, Artist}

I have removed AlbumArtist from itemTags because you are not using this anywhere else in your settings.

[solanum]

Wow, thanks for that super quick response!

I'll give that all a go.