Author Topic: Implementing artist, album, and title sort order  (Read 4245 times)

psychoadept

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This has already come up and been partially resolved with the "ignore words" preferences.  On the other hand, I keep coming across cases where ignoring words doesn't quite do the trick.  Specifically, non-Latin scripts, certain non-English articles that happen to also be English words (the German die, for instance).  I'm sure it would also be helpful to people who prefer sorting artists by last name.

I know I saw a post (which I can't find now, naturally) where Steven said he planned to make it so that sorting by Artist would use Sort Artist without having to also display Sort Artist, but it was a fairly old post.  Is this still in the works?  It's about the only thing I miss from iTunes.

The way iTunes implemented it was to always and only use the sort value for sorting, but if there was no sort tag on the file it would insert the regular value as a virtual tag (automatically ignoring English articles and non-alphanumeric characters as well - obviously this would be covered by the "ignore words" setting in MB).
Last Edit: December 06, 2012, 04:43:12 AM by scampbll
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paq

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To sort by something without showing it as a column:

1. Right-click any column header >Sort By > Define custom sorting.
2. Create or edit a sorting set to your liking by clicking a "..."-button and filling out those values. In your case, maybe only <Sort Artist> would suffice.
3. Now right-click again any column header and choose your sorting set form the Sort By sub-menu.

psychoadept

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To sort by something without showing it as a column:

1. Right-click any column header >Sort By > Define custom sorting.
2. Create or edit a sorting set to your liking by clicking a "..."-button and filling out those values. In your case, maybe only <Sort Artist> would suffice.
3. Now right-click again any column header and choose your sorting set form the Sort By sub-menu.

Aha!  Once again, I see I still have some learning to do about MB...  I will see what I can do with this tonight.  Thanks!
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psychoadept

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Here's what I did that appears to be working (and doesn't require me to fill in sort order for tracks with simple sort order):

I defined four custom tags with the literal tag names: TSOP, TSOA, TSO2, and TSOT.
I used those tags to define four virtual Sort tags following this pattern: $IsNull(<TSOP>,<Artist>,<TSOP>).

I tested it with a track in Hebrew and it looks good.

Edit: I think I'm going to turn this into a how-to for posterity...
Last Edit: December 07, 2012, 05:52:08 AM by scampbll
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