Sorting songs with multiple artists in playlists not sorting as expected

[PrinceMojo]

Poweramp build: 987

When applying a sort option by artists in playlists, songs that have multiple artists go to the bottom of the list; they do not respect the split option for multiple artists. This is problematic for songs that have featured artists.

In the attached pics below, the first pic shows how Bring Me The Horizon is sorted by artists, it seems to be grouped by albums. The second pic shows that after scrolling down, a couple of songs with multiple artists went to the bottom of the Bring Me The Horizon grouping, probably because it seems to be sorted using the whole string 'Bring Me The Horizon; BABYMETAL' and 'Bring Me The Horizon; Underoath'. The expected behavior should be splitting the artists to sort by just the first artist which is 'Bring Me The Horizon' and have the songs grouped with the others from their respective albums.

I have the 'Symbols to Split Multiple Artists' option in Poweramp set to ";", but I also tag multiple artists in mp3tag using '\\' which I believe inserts a null character. I believe the null character parsing has been fixed for a while now (I originally submitted that bug report back in 2022).

Let me know if you need more details or samples.

Edited September 20 by PrinceMojo
Added tags

[andrewilley]

I can see why it would be impractical to sort playlists by split artist names (after all, which of three artists for one song should you use to sort?). So I'm guessing the full unsplit tag is used, which will cause initial sorting by the first artist name, but will continue to use the extra contributors as a second layer within the sort.

So songs by plain "Ed Sheeran" would be sorted first, before collaboration songs by "Ed Sheeran ; Eminem", "Ed Sheeran ; Justin Bieber" and finally "Ed Sheeran ; Stormzy". I believe null-separated tags (such as using "\\" in MP3Tag) are expanded within Poweramp's scanner into a concatenated string format for display purposes (and probably used for this kind of sorting too).

@maxmp could tell us more about the internal workings anyway.

Andre