Better artist sorting with support for the ARTISTSORT tag

[Raphael0]

Feature description:

While the ARTIST tag is used to display the artist name, the ARTISTSORT tag is not displayed but used for sorting in the background. Artists in the artist view list will be sorted alphabetically according to their ARTISTSORT tag.

In practice, this is mainly used for two cases:

1. Removing "The" in front of artist names for "correct" sorting. E.g. ARTIST == "The Strokes" with ARTISTSORT == "Strokes, The" (the usual convention) can be found under the letter "S", as most users would expect.
2. Sorting artists according to their Surname instead of First Name. E.g. ARTIST "Andrew Bird" with ARTISTSORT "Bird, Andrew" (the usual convention) can be found under the letter "B".

Why this could matter to the user:

Users will find it more natural to order the artists without accounting for "The" and many users prefer having artists sorted by surname.
The ARTISTSORT tag is widely used. This is supported in virtually all music players, with songs from most sources already tagged for sorting.

Why this would keep the app simple:

• It is a background feature, invisible if one weren't to use the ARTISTSORT tag in his/her music library
• It reorders artists the way they were intended to be sorted (I think it is safe to assume this, thinking of point 1.) and avoids having a big stack of artists starting with "The"
• Since most bought/downloaded tracks already make use of the tag (according to the conventions above) users shouldn't have to edit their track metadata
• While adding a background layer of complexity, I would argue that this feature makes the library much more intuitive and closer to what a physical music collection would look like, and thus in a way more simple/natural

Additional info:

Depending on how Museeks works, support for ARTISTSORT might require support for ALBUMARTISTSORT (same thing but for the album artist, just as widely used) as I suppose that the ALBUMARTIST tag is currently used to group albums to an artist and sort them.
ALBUMSORT and TITLESORT tags also exist, but these are less common and I would argue, less useful.

Bonus: allow editing the ARTISTSORT tag in the track editing menu (could be useful for users to understand how their library is being sorted and adapt it either by removing or adding the tag where necessary)

I'm back with another tag support suggestion... I'm definitely not a metadata nerd, but I had no choice but to plunge into it since this is the only other thing that, to me, still feels like a downgrade that is difficult to compromise on after using other music players. Thanks again for reading and the fantastic app

[martpie]

yup, make sense indeed, thanks for sharing

[martpie]

So I've been looking into it a little bit, I think I have overengineered things a little bit, and unfortunately, it seems the ARTISTSORT tag is really not well supported. I have many Beatles files with no ARTISTSORT tags, yet on Apple Music they are displayed at B, which is very interesting.

Now a couple of open questions (@Raphael0 tell me what you think)

• Really, it feels to me only ALBUMARTISTSORT matters. TITLESORT, ARTISTSORT, ALBUMSORT don't.
• In that case, we can check if it exists, if it does not, then we default the non-sort value
• BUT, if it starts by "The", we strip the The for indexing.

This is a bit hacky, but there is unfortunately not much we can do more here. I guess in french if a band starts with "Les" or in german "Die", we could support that as well, but that would be a a manual list to maintain.

[martpie]

The current implementation above will not guess that Damon Albarn should be at A (tnh, I don't think it should be at A), unless the ALBUMARTISTSORT tag is set as such.

I feel like it's a fairly good result.

• track title sort: really what's the point, sorting by title is enough and we anyway sort by number in disc by default
• artists sort: who cares? the artists are really just displayed a labels in the track view, nothing else.
• album sort: we sort by year, so not needed.

That would make sense if we had a looot of columns to toggle on/off and specialized for artists vs album artist vs composer etc, but I don't believe Museeks will ever get there.

[Raphael0]

Cool thanks for the update

And yes, that's probably the best solution!

Really, it feels to me only ALBUMARTISTSORT matters. TITLESORT, ARTISTSORT, ALBUMSORT don't.

I agree for TITLESORT and ALBUMSORT! They would only ever have an effect in Museeks when sorting either by Title or by Album alphabetically in list view. This rarely happens, but especially, I think that virtually no tracks actually make use of the tags, and users wouldn't care. (iTunes probably supports the tags just for the sake of completeness).

But, for ARTISTSORT, I assumed that not all tracks would have an ALBUMARTIST tag (which is meant to be used when there are different artists in an album, or e.g. when featured artists are added to an artist's name).
They way I saw it was:

• if there is an ALBUMARTIST use ALBUMARTISTSORT for sorting,
• if there is none, fall back to ARTISTSORT.
  But Museeks might have a different mechanism, or maybe it creates ALBUMARTIST automatically, in which case it wouldn't be needed. In any case, one would need to test what happens for tracks/albums that have no ALBUMARTIST).

In that case, we can check if it exists, if it does not, then we default the non-sort value

Yes!

BUT, if it starts by "The", we strip the The for indexing.

I have no strong opinion for this one. I think Apple Music does this too. If it helps, these are the pros and cons that I see:

PRO:

• Users will have their artists sorted without "The" without having to edit sorting metadata or even having to think about anything
• Users that have half of their library with sorting tags don't get inconsistent sorting (for "The" only)
• Users that want full control can always use sorting tags anyways

CONS:

• It is less clean and less transparent (some tracks get sorted because of "The" some because of the sorting metadata), this might be more confusing for the user and would require more trial and error on their side if trying to understand how their songs are sorted (being able to see+edit sorting tags in the edit menu would help)
• The language issue that you mentioned arises: If we do it with "The" why not "Les", or "Die" etc. ?

I think that the last point is minor because "The XXX" bands can be safely considered a global convention, and again, all is solved if the user uses sorting tags where one can strip "Les" etc. The automatic stripping of "The" could be seen as an intermediary step that cleans up the library for casual users.

I think all this should cover your second comment as well.

Thanks again for considering, and for working on this feature