'Album Sort' - unexpected behaviour

[RSJ]

My understanding has been that if a tag 'Album Sort' is filled, then this is used rather than the contents of 'Album' to sort album names. However, I am getting some unexpected behaviour.

Previously, I have replaced 'Symphonies' and 'Nos.' with 'Symphony' and 'No.' in 'Album Sort' to ensure that albums are sorted in symphony order. This worked as expected.

However, recently, I decided to group symphonies by a particular conductor conductor together. So, in the 'Album Sort' tag I put 'Beethoven Symphony Haitink No. 1' and 'Beethoven Symphony Karajan No. 1', etc. While this sorted most of the albums in the order expected (i.e. the sorting was by composer-symphony-conductor-symphony no.), some were not. For instance, for both Karajan and Haitink, both their ninth symphonies were not in the Karajan or Haitink sequence.

Have I misunderstood the 'album sort' property?

[simoncn]

What are your property settings for tagOptions and tagValue?

[RSJ]

(08-03-2022 22:32)simoncn Wrote:  What are your property settings for tagOptions and tagValue?

Thank you for getting back to me, Simon.

tagOptions
Album.sortTags={Album, Composer}, all.ignore.sort={The, THE, the}, Composer.reverseName.display

tagValue
Artist.Value.Sort={AlbumArtist}, album.value.sort={AlbumSort}

[simoncn]

These settings look OK. Are there any messages in the MinimServer log about sort value conflicts?

[RSJ]

(08-03-2022 22:43)simoncn Wrote:  These settings look OK. Are there any messages in the MinimServer log about sort value conflicts?

I have never looked at this log before. There seem to be huge numbers of warnings. The only one that looks vaguely relevant is this:

Warning: Ignoring conflicting custom value for ALBUM tag 'Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 7' in file Beethoven/Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 7 [Herreweghe]/01-01-Ludwig_van_Beethoven-Symphony_No_4_in_B-Flat_Major_Op_60_I_Adagio-Allegro_v-LLS.flac
applied sort value is 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & 7 [Karajan]'; conflicting sort value is 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & 7'

[RSJ]

Looking at this problem again, it seems to occur where I have a number of recordings with the same album title - e.g. 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9'. I do not differentiate between the different recordings (conductors/orchestras) in the album title.

[simoncn]

The "conflicting custom value" message is produced when different sort values are applied to the same tag value.

For the message you have posted, the tag value:

Beethoven - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 7

occurs in (at least) two different files, one file with the AlbumSort value:

Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & 7 [Karajan]

and another file with the AlbumSort value:

Beethoven - Symphony No. 4 & 7

The first of these sort values is used and the second is ignored. This applies to all tag values and is needed because a tag value cannot be sorted into two different positions at the same time.

The problem with 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9' is likely to be similar, with different AlbumSort values in different files that have this Album tag value.

[RSJ]

This might seem a naive question, but does this mean that two albums (e.g. Beethoven Suymphony No.9) with different conductors and orchestras cannot share the same name? If this is the case, is it sufficent to distinguish between the album names by putting the conductor name in quare brackets after the name of the musical work?

[simoncn]

The two albums can share the same name (Album tag value) as long as they also share the same AlbumSort tag value. The conflict arises when the Album tags are the same but the AlbumSort tags are different.

Alternatively, the two albums can have different names (Album tag value) in which case the AlbumSort tag values can also be different.

[RSJ]

So... If I have two version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, I can call one 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 [Karajan]' and the other 'Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 [Haitink]' and assign different AlbumSort tags.

Is it possible then to exclude the conductor name (e.g. [Karajan]) from the Album title as it appears in, say, Kazoo. I would like to do this, as the album name is already formatted as 'Conductor - Album'.