Last Name, First Name Flip on Lookups

[bruhuff]

Hi:

I've got MB set up exactly as needed, but challenged by the Artist Picture and Biography results, as I use a last name, first name convention for consistency in doing catalog work.  Is it possible, that if there is a comma in the Artist Name, that the two elements are reversed (of course eliminating the comma) for lookup purposes?  I know that artists can have a number of names strung out with commas, but these typically don't work in lookup situations anyway.  What do you think?

Bruce (and my iTunes is now history!)  

Last Name, First Name result



First Name Last Name result

[psychoadept]

Are you aware you could put the lastname, firstname value in Sort Artist and display that? Then you could put firstname lastname in Artist and it will work as expected.

[bruhuff]

Thanks Psychoadept:
I think what you are saying is that the two name formats would exist in two separate fields, and they are entered individually when setting up an entry.  I have 360K tracks, and for those I believe I would have to enter the the first-last name in Artist, and re-key the Last-First name in the Sort Artist field.  Am I right or offbase?  If right, and with the manual effort daunting, I'd probably try to do some routine (unfortunately I don't code), to move existing Artists to Sort Artist and then parse/re-format the Artist field. 

[bruhuff]

Hi Again:
I hit the enter key a little too quick, as upon reflection, it's not such a hard effort.  Mass copies and moves by last-first name artists (the only ones involved in this fix) between the fields can work for me.  Consider this thread closed, and thanks for the answer!
Bruce

[psychoadept]

Glad you figured something out.  For what it's worth, the additional tagging & reporting tools can copy tags in bulk for you. Also, MusicBee's "custom sorting" feature will apply a sort value to all tracks with the same artist value, although it's not necessarily written to the file but maintained in MusicBee's database.