Author Topic: Setting to use Sort Artist/Album/etc  (Read 16147 times)

Steven

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I was thinking more along the lines off having the five '-Sort' values, currently available in the custom tags, being made permanently available tags in the "Sorting" tab.  This then frees up 5 more custom tags slots, another thing that has oft been asked for in the wishlist.
A win-win situation  8)
That did occur to me and i might still do that but the reason i probably wont do that is it could affect file naming templates and virtual tags

Bee-liever

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What's the fifth tag you're thinking of?  I can only think of album, album artist, title, and composer
the other one is artist

That did occur to me and i might still do that but the reason i probably wont do that is it could affect file naming templates and virtual tags
It wouldn't be the first time (and probably not the last  ;)  ) I've had to redo my templates and virtual tags because of a re-think of my custom tag info and order within the tab.
Somewhere in the wishlist is one of mine for MB to notify you of the templates that will be affected by such changes.
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psychoadept

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What's the fifth tag you're thinking of?  I can only think of album, album artist, title, and composer
the other one is artist

Oh, duh.  I had it in my head, but somehow it didn't make it in the list.

Quote
That did occur to me and i might still do that but the reason i probably wont do that is it could affect file naming templates and virtual tags
It wouldn't be the first time (and probably not the last  ;)  ) I've had to redo my templates and virtual tags because of a re-think of my custom tag info and order within the tab.
Somewhere in the wishlist is one of mine for MB to notify you of the templates that will be affected by such changes.

I concur, the benefits of this change outweigh the difficulties.  How hard would it be to include a script to convert existing templates?  If that's complicated, then maybe a warning message when installing the updated version?  And Bee-liever's suggestion of tracking templates makes sense, too.
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vzell

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I was thinking more along the lines off having the five '-Sort' values, currently available in the custom tags, being made permanently available tags in the "Sorting" tab.  This then frees up 5 more custom tags slots, another thing that has oft been asked for in the wishlist.
A win-win situation  8)

+1

What's the fifth tag you're thinking of?  I can only think of album, album artist, title, and composer

+1

hiccup

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+1 for having at least these three directly available:

sort album artist
sort artist
sort composer


(I left out 'sort album', 'sort title', 'sort show', since I personally don't care for those)

I can understand some concern for possibly affecting file naming templates and virtual tags some more experienced users might already have setup, but I am guessing they would welcome and understand this improvement and are willing and able to make the necessary changes in their setups.
And importantly, they would probably also welcome the freed-up available custom tags.

psychoadept

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+1 for having at least these three directly available:

sort album artist
sort artist
sort composer


(I left out 'sort album', 'sort title', 'sort show', since I personally don't care for those)

I just think if it's done for any of them, it should be all
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hiccup

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I just think if it's done for any of them, it should be all

You're probably right.
It would be good to have a clear distinction between 'regular' tags, and actual 'custom' tags.
I remember that confusing me a bit too when I first started using MusicBee. Why would you need the 'custom tag' feature for regular tags?

hiccup

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Hm, a big oversight, I now see 'artist sort' and 'album artist sort' are already available.
But in drop-down menu's they are to be found under the 's' ('sort artist', 'sort album artist')
Understandable, but for consistency it might be better to have them there under the 'a' ('artist sort' and 'album artist sort').

I ran through all the common tagging fields I am aware of, and made a list of tags that are currently only available by using the custom tag feature.

I divided them in three groups. The first group is what I would really like to see directly available without needing (sacrificing) custom tags.
The second group would be less important to me personally to have directly available, and the third even less.


I.
composer sort order                                          TSOC
subtitle (useful for classical)                                 TIT3
set subtitle (useful for classical)                            TSST
original album (perhaps useful for classical; work?)    TOAL
original filename (useful for classical)                       TOAF
musician credit list                                               TMCL
language                                                            TLAN
remixer                                                              TPE4
album sort order                                                 TSOA


II.
involved people list              TIPL
initial key                           TKEY
media type                         TMED
original artist (performer)      TOPE


III.
file type                                           TFLT
original lyricist                                   TOLY
file owner                                         TOWN
net radio station                                TRSN
net radio owner                                 TRSO
international standard recording code    ISRC
commercial info                                  WCOM
copyright                                          WCOP
official audio file url                            WOAF
official artist url                                 WOAR
radio page url                                    WORS
publisher url                                      WPUB
Last Edit: December 13, 2016, 06:50:41 PM by hiccup

Steven

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Many folks expect sort artist, etc to work like they do in iTunes (as I did initially).  Ignore Words helps, but it doesn't cover every scenario (non-english characters, trying to sort by last name, etc).  How about having a single setting in Preferences that would force Artist, Album Artist, Title, and Composer to sort by their respective Sort tags, when available?  This would vastly reduce the need for custom sort orders.
for the next v3.1 update, the editing of sort tags is implemented in a similar way to the iTunes Sorting tab in its tag editor.
The behavior of using the sort values when sorting the associated field (eg. using the value entered for sort artist affects how artist is sorted) is already implemented in v3.1. I have added a setting to disable that new behavior, although i might remove that setting from the GUI for the sake of keeping the settings simpler.
And lastly sort tags are no longer enabled via custom tags - they have their own dedicated input fields now, and hence free's up those custom tag fields. I have implemented some migration code that remaps any custom fields to the new dedicated fields so you should not need to manually change any naming templates. However if you go back to using an older MB version, you will need to manually remap the custom tags.

I will post an updated v3.1 probably on the weekend with these changes.

psychoadept

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Wow, that's awesome! Can't wait to see it in action.
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CritterMan

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I like the approach you took, and greatly appreciate the migration code.
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Steven

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for the next v3.1 update, the editing of sort tags is implemented in a similar way to the iTunes Sorting tab in its tag editor.
The behavior of using the sort values when sorting the associated field (eg. using the value entered for sort artist affects how artist is sorted) is already implemented in v3.1. I have added a setting to disable that new behavior, although i might remove that setting from the GUI for the sake of keeping the settings simpler.
And lastly sort tags are no longer enabled via custom tags - they have their own dedicated input fields now, and hence free's up those custom tag fields. I have implemented some migration code that remaps any custom fields to the new dedicated fields so you should not need to manually change any naming templates. However if you go back to using an older MB version, you will need to manually remap the custom tags.
as mentioned this version migrates any custom sort tags to dedicated tags. If you want to go back to an older 3.1 version, you will need to re-assign the custom tags and redo any naming templates that referenced the custom sort tags

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_1/MusicBee31_Patched.zip

CritterMan

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Did you change how <Year> is handled for sorting? It looks like it normalizes the date format before sorting, perhaps like this:

Code
$Date(<Year>,yyyy-MM-dd)

If so, thank you very much!

My chronological sorting was broken by this update until I tried it without using the above virtual tag formula I had previously set to account for the differences in date format in my files. Now it works as I intended without the virtual tag no matter what format is in the metadata.

In case anyone is wondering: my mp3 files have dates stored as M/d/yyyy and my flac files use yyyy-MM-dd.
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psychoadept

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This looks great so far!  The conversion appears to have gone perfectly.  Working on moving my custom tags into the empty slots now.  :D

Edit: Ok, one thing not changed by the conversion was grouping by Sort Composer in one of my custom views.  But that's easily fixed.
Last Edit: January 07, 2017, 07:45:39 PM by psychoadept
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hiccup

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Before I jump in, join the pool party, and revise my tagging scheme:
Should I assume that my proposal for the other tags I was wishing for to become regular tags is off the table for the near future?

http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=20494.0