Author Topic: Anybody Know How To Customize The Sort String  (Read 2125 times)

Risk529

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I am trying to find a way to sort my library by the artist. I use the ":" to separate the featured artists - which when I sort by "Artist," the songs with the features always fall to the bottom. Since many of my songs list "Various Artists" as the "Album Artists" - I was looking for a way to set up a field (or just to do the sort) where I can sort all artists before the ":", so then I can keep my album sequencing together and still have when the artist show up on "Various Artists" things (Like soundtracks) - it will still group the artist near his/her other work

psychoadept

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Have you looked at using custom sort values on the sorting tab in the tag editor? Beyond that, I think I'd need to see specific examples to offer any help.
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Risk529

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If you can see in the picture - I want to be able to sort by artist and not Album Artist - but I want to either set the sort (or learn how to create a custom field) - that only takes the information before the first semicolon and uses that --  that way if my album artist is "Various Artist" and my Artists is "Artist 1; Artist 2" - the field would sort for "Artist 1" by itself

frankz

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That's never going to work.  You need to split those artists off using the artist splitter in the tag editor so that each is in its own artist tag and then leave the primary artist as the display artist at the top in order to sort the way you want to sort.

Risk529

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How would I go about doing that? I am all for whatever works so I can display the albums correctly and still have my various artists match up there too

tangotonyb

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The way I handle this is I separate Artists by || instead of ;
I have a virtual tag called FirstArtist defined as "$Replace($Replace($Replace($Replace($Split(<Sort Artist>," ||",1),-,1),',1)," ",),.,)"

I use Sort Artist rather than Artist here to strip of the "The" etc. The Replace functions are to strip out superfluous characters.

So if for example my Artist is "The Chainsmokers || Winona Oak" - the FirstArtist field will have "Chainsmokers"

I then define a CustomSort based on FirstArtist, followed by Title.

psychoadept

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I think this could be solved pretty easily with custom sorting/sort artists. I can test more later, but I just put the main artist as the sort artist value and my sorting handles it. You might need to add Sort Artist to your sorting, rather than just artist.
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Risk529

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I love the "Sort Artist" idea - That will give me exactly what I need!

I am trying to play with the string so I can sort the artist like you @tangotonyb - but just keeping the same ";" separator (I like it because the system already knows to split that as a new artist)

tangotonyb

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I had a very specific reason (which I can't remember now) for using || in Artists. In many other fields I use ; and split the field. I know I encountered an issue - it may have been in Traktor which only displayed ONE of the Artists if I used ;.

So you can just swap out the || in the RegEx for ;

$Replace($Replace($Replace($Replace($Split(<Sort Artist>,"; ",1),-,1),',1)," ",),.,)