Support "Sort Artist" and "Sort Album Artist" tags for sorting

[mkosma]

iTunes supports these tags which it uses to sort Artists and Album Artists. That lets you sort an artist like "Sage Francis" by last name, under F, where he should be.

So, great to have the option to use such tags for sorting.

[Cwaniak]

Also, it would be really nice if I could sort my music in album view for example by artist and then by date, not alphabetically like it is now by default.

[MotleyG]

Other tags iTunes and other players use exist for Title, Album, and Composer. Besides making it easy to ignore articles like “A”, “An”, and “The” it also allows for sorting by Last Name, First Name while still display First Name Last Name. Reviving this relatively old request in 2018. With all the changes in V3 coming, any chance this can be something the updated database can manage?

GB

[MotleyG]

Any chance the sort tags will get implemented in PAv3? It is the biggest difference of how libraries are displayed between all of the current Android media players versus iOS devices. Showing artists by last name is how I refer to see them.

[Shelanoir]

+1 This would also solve sorting for artists with non-English names that do not use "The" as an article, and sorting for Artists/Albums that have special characters in their name/title

[Sada]

When we sort albums by "Album artist", many albums without album artist tag are listed at the bottom. It is better to use artist name instead of album artist if albums do not have album artist tag even when we use "Album artist" sort.

[MotleyG]

@maxmp

It has been a while since this thread was started. Is there any chance you are working on adding the sort options for the library for browsing?

[MotleyG]

Bumping this thread, it has been a while without any updates. Any chance these sort tags will be integrated into PA any time soon?

[LABB]

+1

I would like to see that implemented as well. My collection does have these tags and it would be useful to sort non-English content that use articles other than "The", as said before by other users.

The tags for this feature would include: titlesort, albumsort, artistsort, albumartistsort

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, LABB said:

The tags for this feature would include: titlesort, albumsort, artistsort, albumartistsort

Sounds to me like something that could be useful. Out of interest, how would you want files without any such tags to be handled? Should they be put into an 'Unknown' group - in the same way that the Album Artists category works at the moment - or should sorting files without those tags fall back to using the ordinary Title, Artist, etc tags? I would suggest a fall-back mode would be better - to be honest, that would probably be better for Album Artists too.

Andre  

[MotleyG]

There is also a Composer sort tag.

@andrewilley the better solution I believe is to revert to the non-sort tag in the cases where sort tags are blank. This is how iOS has been doing it since they introduced these tags a long time ago. However many other non-Apple players are now using these tags as well.

Besides the ability to ignore prefixes (i.e. The Beatles can be sorted as Beatles), it also means one can use sort tags for many other purposes. For those like myself that prefer to find artists listed under their last name, the sort tag can be Lennon, John while the actual display still shows John Lennon in the lists and now.playing screens.

Since the sort tags are used in the background and never actually displayed, they can also contain other helpful sorting tags. For example, those with multiple releases of the same album can add the year or release number in the sort tag. So Dark Side Of The Moon can easily be listed chronologically, by the release name, etc. All by your personal preference - while the alb name itself can still show only the title if that is your preference.

Even the Artist tag is helpful here. For those that have released under different names, the track can list the name on the associated release, but the SortArtist tag can include any of the names to include in searches. So John Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp, and John Mellencamp can all be in the sort tag. Or in my OCD case - Cougar, John/Mellencamp, John Cougar/Mellencamp, John.

[LABB]

On 7/10/2020 at 8:14 AM, andrewilley said:

Sounds to me like something that could be useful. Out of interest, how would you want files without any such tags to be handled? Should they be put into an 'Unknown' group - in the same way that the Album Artists category works at the moment - or should sorting files without those tags fall back to using the ordinary Title, Artist, etc tags? I would suggest a fall-back mode would be better - to be honest, that would probably be better for Album Artists too.

Andre  

If titlesort, albumsort, artistsort, albumartistsort tags do not exist, then I think it should sort by its normal tags (without sort at the end of each one).

[acksoft]

I am a new user and LOVE your player -- about the only feature request I have is to allow me to sort all anthology albums that contain "various artists" so that each artist on the album doesn't show up separately when when I go to Library->Artists.

For many of the artists on those albums, the track is the ONLY ONE I have by them.  I don't need hundreds of artist names for whom I only have one track "polluting" my Artists listing.  When I go to Library-> Artists, I'd like to see one entry: Various Artists.  When I select that, I'd like to see the track titles listed with the name of the artist for that track beneath it.

Being able to do this will allow me to avoid scrolling past hundreds of artist names that are irrelevant to me.

I am on V3-build-884-am64-play, Full version 64 bit

My phone is LG-ThinQ 35, with a 1 TB external storage drive (Full of *very meta-data curated* .flac files)

Thanks for listening.

[andrewilley]

@acksoft Have you tried using the Album Artists category? That will show a single entry for "Various Artists", and any album names will show under that. Obviously all of your regular albums need to have the Album Artist tag set correctly too, but you did say your meta data is well curated.

Andre

[acksoft]

Andre,

Thanks for the quick reply.  I'm sorry but I am confused by your use of the word "category".  When I go to the Library (the "four squares" button a the bottom left of the screen) I only see Artists, not Album Artists.  Must I set some configuration element to make this appear?  Or perhaps I am looking at the wrong place?

And YES, *all* of my albums have both Artist and Album Artist set.  Took a lot of time but I'm picky that way 😄

[acksoft]

Whup! Found it!  Kept poking around until I found the "vertical ellipses" which let me add the missing category.  Thanks so much for your help.

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, acksoft said:

I only see Artists, not Album Artists.  Must I set some configuration element to make this appear?

Yes, to keep the categories list down to manageable proportions a number of the options are not displayed by default, although I must admit I didn't know that Album Artists was one of them. You can enable more choices by tapping the menu icon (three-dots) in the top Library view and selecting List Options.

Andre

[acksoft]

Andre,

Okay, Here's an actual feature request. 🙂

I now have the Album Artist category showing me only "Various Artists" as I wanted (thanks for the tip that helped me get there). 

However, when I select an album from the resulting list (like "Pure Funk" in the examples attached), I want each song in the list to show the artist for that song.  As you can see from one screenshot, these should be "Commodores", "Average White Band" and "Earth, Wind and Fire" and so on.  Clicking on the vertical ellipses (...), I get what is shown in the other screen shot, but there is no option in there to set the name of the Artist for each track to display.  I don't really need the album title to be repeated in the song listing, I already know which album I chose. What I need is the title and artist of the song.

Since "Various Artists" collections are by their very nature made up of multiple artists, it would be good to be able to see who the artist is for each track...

Thanks for listening.

  

[MotleyG]

8 minutes ago, acksoft said:

Andre,

Okay, Here's an actual feature request. 🙂

I now have the Album Artist category showing me only "Various Artists" as I wanted (thanks for the tip that helped me get there). 

However, when I select an album from the resulting list (like "Pure Funk" in the examples attached), I want each song in the list to show the artist for that song.  As you can see from one screenshot, these should be "Commodores", "Average White Band" and "Earth, Wind and Fire" and so on.  Clicking on the vertical ellipses (...), I get what is shown in the other screen shot, but there is no option in there to set the name of the Artist for each track to display.  I don't really need the album title to be repeated in the song listing, I already know which album I chose. What I need is the title and artist of the song.

Since "Various Artists" collections are by their very nature made up of multiple artists, it would be good to be able to see who the artist is for each track...

Thanks for listening.

  

In Settings>Library>Lists there are options for the Albums section, disable the one for Album Artist Label for Tracks.

[acksoft]

MotleyG,

Nice try but it's already disabled.  The screen shots are what I see.

However, you seem to have got me close!  I just disabled "Album Artist label for Album Artist Tracks" (two options further down the settings page), and THAT seems to have done the trick.

THANKS! 😁

[MotleyG]

35 minutes ago, acksoft said:

MotleyG,

Nice try but it's already disabled.  The screen shots are what I see.

However, you seem to have got me close!  I just disabled "Album Artist label for Album Artist Tracks" (two options further down the settings page), and THAT seems to have done the trick.

THANKS! 😁

Yup, missed the list you were on, but glad to help you get it figured out.

[andrewilley]

I was about to say that too, which type of Artist name you want to display in various list formats is already configurable in Settings > Library > Lists.

Andre

[MotleyG]

@maxmp So back to the original request in this post, is there any plan to add the sorting fields for the PA database in the near future?

[andrewilley]

I assume this request is to recognise the ID3v2.4 tags TSOT (Title sort order), TSOA (Album sort order, TSOP (Performer/Artist sort order), and their various Vorbis equivalents (which include an Album Artist sorting order too)?

If implemented, I assume that in all appropriate alphabetical list option settings, you would want any tracks that contain such tags to be sorted using the sort-tag contents fully verbatim, with any non sort-tagged items interspersed using the current logic (which respects the 'article removal' setting for "The", "An", etc).

It does sound like a nice idea to me anyway, although I'm not sure how widespread those tags are in the wild.

Andre

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

I assume this request is to recognise the ID3v2.4 tags TSOT (Title sort order), TSOA (Album sort order, TSOP (Performer/Artist sort order), and their various Vorbis equivalents (which include an Album Artist sorting order too)?

If implemented, I assume that in all appropriate alphabetical list option settings, you would want any tracks that contain such tags to be sorted using the sort-tag contents fully verbatim, with any non sort-tagged items interspersed using the current logic (which respects the 'article removal' setting for "The", "An", etc).

Even v2.3 tags have them. Apple introduced them into iTunes years ago and I haven't moved any of my tags to v2.4.

Your logic is valid, using the sort tags "behind the scenes" for sorting purposes but displaying the associated standard tag. And in any case where a sort tag doesn't exist, fall back to an existing standard tag for sorting.

The current ones I am aware of are for Title, Album, Artist, AlbumArtist, and Composer for music. Others for movie and TV shows don't apply for PA.