Cleaning up Sorting (Last Name, First Name) for Album Artists and Artists

[please55]

I am having a bit of trouble getting MusicBee to respect sorting.

I'm currently using the Last Name, First Name convention and I'm using mp3tag for most of my tagging needs.

In my example, for an album I've set ALBUMARTISTSORT as Last, First and in the main pannel I'm using for sorting -  Album Artist/Year/Album.

However, this isn't working. Does Musicbee respect that tag or do I need to enforce a setting to get it to use ALBUMARTISTSORT?

[psychoadept]

By default MusicBee only uses the sort tags if you explicitly create a sort order with them. I think if you turn on the "custom sorting" setting in the tag editor it will do what you want, though.

[please55]

Thanks, that's what I thought. I enabled personalized sorting but I'm not getting quite the results I expected. Here's an example.



In the first screen cap you can see that MB is respecting the ALBUMARTISTSORT and its sorted along with others beginning with 'H'.

However, you can see directly below, its not sorting the individual artists as I've tagged them (ARTISTSORT). 'A Hawk and a Hacksaw' is not sorted as 'Hawk and a Hacksaw, A'.

[psychoadept]

What do you see in the Sorting tab of the tag editor for that particular track? There should be a button at the bottom left that you can click to see all the individual artist sort values MusicBee thinks it has, and enter new ones if you need to.

[please55]

1. This is the custom sorting option I turned on earlier (is this correct?)

2. Artist sort appears to be filled in...not sure if that's picked up from tags or generated by MB. Why not just use it?

3-4. I'm not entirely sure what this setting is for.  Either way, two of the entries don't have a sorting...even though the embeded tags explicitly state one for ARTISTSORT.  Not sure about the other two...is it listing albumsorting here as well?

I deleted the album from the collected and rescanned the files. Exact same results as above.

[psychoadept]

MusicBee doesn't know which Sort Artist pairs with which Artist unless you tell it by filling in the chart. It can only show you all the artists and all the sort artists together, which is what you currently get.

The good news is that you only have to do it once for each artist. You don't have to do it for each track. (In other words, once you tell it that you want to sort "A Hawk and a Hacksaw" as a "Hawk and a Hacksaw, A" for this track, it will automatically sort it that way throughout your library.)

[please55]

Good point about matching which entry to what. Seems evident when you point it out.

Do  you want to take a guess or know how the other two got filled in?

A Hawk and a Hacksaw & The Hun Hangár Ensemble -> Hawk and a Hacksaw, A; Hun Hangár Ensemble, The (This seems to be how its sorting the ALBUMARTISTSORT).
A Hawk and a Hacksaw; The Hun Hangár Ensemble -> Hawk and a Hacksaw, A; Hun Hangár Ensemble, The (This seems to be a merge of both ARTISTS and their sorting maybe?)

Thanks so much for your help btw.

One side question - Going through this I've noticed MB sometimes writes additional tags to the file. Is there a way to limit or stop this? Preferably the only thing I'd want touched are ratings and lyrics but I'm noticing other things are getting modified/added.

[psychoadept]

Do  you want to take a guess or know how the other two got filled in?

A Hawk and a Hacksaw & The Hun Hangár Ensemble -> Hawk and a Hacksaw, A; Hun Hangár Ensemble, The (This seems to be how its sorting the ALBUMARTISTSORT).
A Hawk and a Hacksaw; The Hun Hangár Ensemble -> Hawk and a Hacksaw, A; Hun Hangár Ensemble, The (This seems to be a merge of both ARTISTS and their sorting maybe?)

No guess needed. The first, as you say, is the Album Artist and Sort Album Artist. The second is ALL values found in the file for Artist and ALL values found for Sort Artist, with ";" as a separator. The ";" does not actually exist except in what MusicBee calls the Display Artist; it's a human-readable representation of what is a non-character tag delimiter in the file.

Going through this I've noticed MB sometimes writes additional tags to the file. Is there a way to limit or stop this? Preferably the only thing I'd want touched are ratings and lyrics but I'm noticing other things are getting modified/added.

As mentioned, when there are multiple artist values or multiple composer values MusicBee automatically creates Display Artist and Display Composer to hold the human-readable concatenated value of all the tags. Other than that I don't believe MusicBee writes any tags unless you explicitly make changes in the main panel or the tag editor. Check on Tags (2) of Preferences that auto-save isn't activated, but it's not by default.

[please55]

On a more personal level I am curious how you organize your library. I know there isn't one method but do you bother to split up artists this way? If its just a featured artist, do you keep it in the title, move it to artist field or even split them up into multiple artist fields?

- - -



Dang it, another one cropped up.

I deleted all albums by this artist. Closed down MB, then rescanned library for new files(default: insert).  Not sure why MB has alert that the posted artist/albumartist sort doesn't match what its using (!).

Do I really need to set every artist's sort even when there's only one artist involved? Or is there something that I can do that increases chances MB would get the sorting right without intervention?

[SOLVED] Apparently simply rescanning library for new files doesn't update MB libray info. I had to right click - send to - rescan files to get MB to update it's internal tagging info.

[psychoadept]

On a more personal level I am curious how you organize your library. I know there isn't one method but do you bother to split up artists this way? If its just a featured artist, do you keep it in the title, move it to artist field or even split them up into multiple artist fields?try

Oh, yeah. I definitely do that. I even try to break out guest artists, performers, remixers, etc, which MusicBee supports in the Multiple Artist Splitter. I've configured MusicBrainz Picard to write to those tags as appropriate.

I feel pretty safe saying most of the regular forum members do that to some degree or another, and try to discourage people from putting featured artists in titles when that misses out on a lot of the capabilities of MusicBee and other reasonably advanced players and taggers. MusicBee offers ways to split out all these different categories or ignore them as needed.


- - -

[SOLVED] Apparently simply rescanning library for new files doesn't update MB libray info. I had to right click - send to - rescan files to get MB to update it's internal tagging info.

Yeah, this has come up for me a few times. Only Steven could tell us why there's a difference in behavior there.

[please55]

Yay, more work

/s

[phred]

I feel pretty safe saying most of the regular forum members do that to some degree or another, and try to discourage people from putting featured artists in titles when that misses out on a lot of the capabilities of MusicBee and other reasonably advanced players and taggers. MusicBee offers ways to split out all these different categories or ignore them as needed.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but this quote is going to cause more work for me. As it has for the OP.
I'm a fairly regular user and guilty as all get-out. I've always entered the featured artist as part of the title. psychoadept: why didn't you mention this years ago? Or if you did, why didn't you tell me to read it? :-)

Doing a search on my entire library, I -only- have 434 tracks with the featured artist as part of the title. Forgive me for my sins. Looking at the Artist Splitter, I don't see 'featured artist' as a role, but do see guest artist. So that's what I'll use. Do you know offhand if boroda's Advanced Search & Replace is capable of removing "(feat. Idiot Phred)" and putting "Idiot Phred" as the guest artist? While there is a preset, it doesn't work as I expected it to. Perhaps I'll finish this on boroda's thread.

[frankz]

Just as a personal note, you may want to leave the featured artist in the title in addition to adding the performer as a tag.  I find it very useful while listening to music, especially in the car where I can't readily access the tags, to have that information displayed in the title.  Having this information in the title is the convention followed on the major streaming sites, probably for this same reason.

I've been doing this manually, so I'm interested to see what comes of your post in the tagging tools thread.

[psychoadept]

Looking at the Artist Splitter, I don't see 'featured artist' as a role, but do see guest artist. So that's what I'll use. Do you know offhand if boroda's Advanced Search & Replace is capable of removing "(feat. Idiot Phred)" and putting "Idiot Phred" as the guest artist? While there is a preset, it doesn't work as I expected it to. Perhaps I'll finish this on boroda's thread.

Yeah, I think featured artist and guest artist are meant to be the same thing. At least that's how I use them. And I immediately thought of that preset so good luck getting it working. I totally didn't mean to call anybody out, lol.

Frankz, that makes me think there should be a setting for recombining them while syncing but I don't imagine that happening any time soon.

[frankz]

Frankz, that makes me think there should be a setting for recombining them while syncing but I don't imagine that happening any time soon.

I actually prefer it when sitting and listening to music from the computer, too. It's helpful to be able to glance over at the screen and see who that guest singer is without having to dig into tags.

I like it in the multi-tag for searching purposes, but having it be in a "top level" displayed field (either title or artist according to taste) is extremely convenient.  I'm from the "old days" where the convention was having the info in the title, so I stuck with that even though MusicBrainz switched it up some time ago. 

Streaming sites either put it in the title or both artist and title (Spotify).

Billboard charts list the featured artist in the artist.