Is there a way to set the Artist and Album Sort Fields to take the values of Artist Last Name, Artist First Name with a script? It looks like that is the default for when you download information from MusicBrainz, but I have a lot of files already tagged that are currently set to sort by First Name Last Name. I’d like to change it to modify it.
If you just want to format the one tag, Picard is probably not the best solution. But you should be able to put your files in Picard and retrieve the sort artist values from the database, if you’re determined to do it that way. It is possible to retrieve only the one tag, but it takes some work. You have to add pretty much everything else to your protected tags.
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I think what you are saying is that your music files have Sortname tags which read, “Firstname Lastname”, and you want to use Picard to change those Sortname tags to read “Lastname, Firstname”. Well, you could ask Picard to completely re-tag your files. You will get Sortname set to Musicbrainz values, which is the “Lastname, Firstname” you seek. As a side effect, you’ll get much better metadata throughout.
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I am probably a bit late to join the discussion. But @Jim - how to do that?
I have files which have “Eric Clapton” and “Claptop, Eric”. Howto just change the “artistsort” - tag?
If this can be better done with other tools, no problem. Best would be to list all files from an Album (there might be mIxed ones) an the select those that should be change…
I have not been aware of this “artistsort” tag before, does most music-players can use it?
What I propose for the original poster is to let Picard do what it does by default. To learn more about this, see the Picard Quick Start explanation at https://picard.musicbrainz.org/quick-start/ .
The question about which music players use ArtistSort tags is a separate question for a separate thread, and one that I don’t know enough to attempt to answer.
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