Problem with Autotagging "Album Artist Sort Order" "Artist Sort Order"

Hello,

when i have an Album with Artists like DJ, or Artistname are 2 Words, why the fuck Musicbrainz make out of the great and 100% correct meta data

Artists George Morel

in the Field

Artist Sort Order Morel, George

Same for Album Artist Sort Order.

How i can say Picard for every Album, stop this shit, and let the Datafield “Album Sort Order” and “Artist Sort Order” just blank.

I manually changed that for every album i imported in the past, (when i realize that). But i first see this little mess, as i exported my library list as pdf.

And every Album i tagged with picard is wrong in the list. The Beatles i dont found in “T” i found them in B.

Please i search now very long for an answer. The old posts i found via google cache dont work anymore.

Would be nice if you could help me. Cause i dont save Time with Musicbrainz, when i must tag every album manually.

Try putting this in Options > Advanced > Scripting and reload any album loaded:

$unset(artistsort)
$unset(albumartistsort)

Or if you want the tags, but you want to keep the normal artist name there:

$set(artistsort,%artist%)
$set(albumartistsort,%albumartist%)

And to why Picard does that: Because “Morel, George” is the way “George Morel” is sorted usually. If you would look him up in your phone book, you would look under M, not G. And it is the purpose of those tags to include a sortable name. Most people I have seen so far prefer this for sorting their collection (just recently there was somebody who asked here about how to get this kind of sort name with MusicBrainz inside the filenames).

So please think twice in the future before calling functionality, that a lot of people want exactly that way, shit. Thanks.

6 Likes

I definitely prefer the sort order fields! I have folders by the first letter of the Album Artist Sort order and I don’t want to fill it with all the “The” groups! This would be the same place you would find it when buying it at a store.

Moving those common words to the end is also a big help - for example “Beastie Boys” is not “The Beastie Boys”. With the Album Artist Sort, I don’t have any doubt that I look under “B”.

I also wouldn’t want to try to remember to lookup up Bach under J or C, Tchaikovsky under P, or Rachmaninoff under S!

2 Likes

Thanks buddy, i used in my old scripts
$unset%artistsort%
$unset%albumartistsort%

And that dont work anymore.
You saved me much time, and maybe its a bug on the mac version, but after saving i restart picard, and with your advice it just works fine.

But why wrong Metadata is stored in the MB Database? I dont see any positive Cause for this, only when u tag your complete library with musicbrainz?

iTunes, Amazon, Beatport, etc. dont tag with that standard musicbrainz does. So why MB use this?

There’s nothing wrong with that data. It’s additional data to the artist name, purposively input by editors. If you don’t want the sort order don’t use it.

Well, try reading @thebradleys post.

We definitely aren’t here to imitate iTunes or Amazon :laughing:

5 Likes

This is correct, and what the ‘artist sort order’ field is for.
What would be the point of the ‘artist sort order’ field if it was exactly the same as the ‘artist’ field?

That said, with Picard you can feel free to tag things however you want!
And if you keep the MBID tags (and do things with scripts and settings instead of manually) you can easily change things if you change your mind later - so it’s not actually that important to get it right straight away.

4 Likes

I had the same question and wrote this script to help:

$if($ne(%genre%,Classical),$set(artistsort,%artist%)$set(albumartistsort,%albumartist%),)
$swapprefix(%artistsort%)
$swapprefix(%albumartistsort%)

If the song’s Genre is not Classical (I personally do not use sub genres or eras of Classical in my folders), then overwrite ArtistSort with Artist and AlbumArtistSort with AlbumArtist, this clears out the name switching.
Then it runs through ArtistSort and AlbumArtistSort and uses Foobar2000’s default swap function, which looks for leading The’s and A’s and put them in the back of the tags following a coma.

I want my classical artists stored by last name, and to not have folders sorted by simple prefixes, but do not want my other artists sorted by last name so this script gets me around that issue.

This can be used for other tags like composer as well.

1 Like