Newbie: How to use Picard-Last.fm.ng and changing artist to artist sort order

Newbie to Picard and I’m looking for help with two things:

1.Where can I find a tutorial on using Picard-Last.fm.ng? I think I have it loaded correctly (Linux, in the plugin directory), but I don’t see it in the list of plugins in the Options screen. I also don’t see a genre tag in the list of tags for a given album or song. I’d like to try to assign a simple genre to my library.
2. How can I copy the “Artist Sort Order” to the “Artist” tag? My car seems to only sort by “Artist” so many bands that start with “The” are all lumped together. I see that the “Artist Sort Order” has “The” appended at the end, like “Business, The”. Might be good to clear out all the other Artist fields too: Album Artist, Album Artist Sort Order, Artists, etc. or make them all the same as “Artist Sort Order”. And it seems like Picard could take a while to do this on my library since it seems to look up each song. I would just want to manipulate the tags since they’ve all been through Picard already and have the tags populated.

I tried using the scripting feature and it seems that it won’t let me update the Artist tag with a %tag%. I tried:
$set(artist,%albumartistsort%)

It updated the Album Artist Sort Order and Artist Sort Order tags instead of the Artist. If I do a $set(artist,Test), it updates it to “Test”. Seems like the %tags% don’t work.

You can do this in the “File Naming” Picard setting:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/#file_naming
Example from my setting:
%_extension%/$if2(%albumartistsort%,%artistsort%)/%originaldate%-%album% [%date% - %releasecountry% - %label% - %catalognumber% - %barcode% - %media%]/$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%-,)$num(%tracknumber%,2)$if(%compilation%, %artistsort% -,) %title%

Did you also check the sort field in the database? Sometimes it’s not set correctly:
https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=artist%3AThe+AND+sortname%3A"The%3F%3F"&type=artist&limit=100&method=advanced

Thanks Hydra.
The filenames are fine, it’s the tags themselves I’m trying to change. I’ve found that my car only sorts on the Artist tag and no other tags and not the filename.
I may have to write a script to manipulate the data manually, but I’m trying to avoid that.
I’ll try the filenaming script on the Artist tag and see what happens.

You could try the following:

Install the plugin “View script variables” and enable it within Picard. This helps a lot to see what happens under the hood. And enable debug logging…

Many scripts I’ve seen use:
$set(artist,$get(albumartistsort))
or

What’s the file format? Maybe the following is interesting too and relates to your issue:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/tags/#other_information

For technical details on how these tags are written into files, see Picard Tag Mapping.

If you set new variables, these will be saved as new tags in ID3, APEv2 and VORBIS based files. For ID3 based files these will be saved to, and reloaded from, ID3 user defined text information (TXXX) frames. They will not be saved in ASF, MP4 or WAV based files.

For ID3 based tags i.e. mp3 files, you can also set ID3 tags directly from your scripts by setting a special variable starting ‘_id3:’. Currently these tags are not loaded into variables when you reload the file into Picard. (Since Picard 0.9)

Picard is acting all kinds of crazy or maybe it’s just not intuitive to me.
I tried an experiment where I simply did this in the Scripting area:
$set(artist,Test)

I would have expected the Artist tag to change to the text “Test”. It does, but it also changes the Album Artist Sort Order and the Artist Sort Order tags. It also adds a new tag with the name of the Artist and it’s set to the original artist name (with the “The” in the name).

Can you please post all of the scripts from both the “File Naming” and “Scripting” sections under “Options”. My guess is that it’s one of them that’s making the changes.

Note that you can have more than one script in the “Scripting” section, but they may be hidden if you don’t have the list side of the window open (see below). If you don’t see the list, place your cursor near the left side and you should see a handle which you can drag to the right. Quite often the list will be hidden when Picard is first installed.

Here is the option with the list not visible:

Here is the option with the list visible after dragging it open:

Note that from the list you can enable / disable individual scripts as well.

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Not the OP, but thanks…I was wondering how to manage multiple scripts!

Ha! They should really default to having that list of scripts open.
I had uninstalled then reinstalled before I saw this post. But now I know where to look. Thanks!

Now, about that genre plugin…