I have a problem with this in Music libraries.
If I set a library to sort the albums for an artist ‘Oldest first’ (or newest), what date does it use? Well it seems to use the earliest date of any of the tracks of an album, which is not an entirely stupid idea. But not always correct. For which reason I have all such albums with the Sort Album tag starting with the album’s release date (month and year). In this way, iTunes sorts an artist’s albums in the top right pane of the ‘Browser’ by the release date, so in this way it is possible for me, the user, to control the sort order. That’s what the Sort tags were introduced for. And it works, PERFECTLY.
Except for apps like Plex that when you specify to sort an artist’s albums ‘By Name’, it uses the Album tag and not the Sort Album tag. Doh! Quite frankly, why anyone would want to see an artist’s albums listed alphabetically is beyond me, but it’s an option that needs to be there for those that do. However, in this case the developer MUST then use the SORT version of the tag in question. In this case, when selecting to sort an Artist’s albums ‘By Name’, Plex SHOULD sort by the Sort Album tag (using the regular tag only when the Sort version is absent). This allows every user to completely control the sort order. Or not. If they simply ignore the Sort tags, sorting will be by the normal tags. Anyway, Plex gets it wrong and if you select ‘By Name’, an Artist’s albums get sorted by the Album tag and this is WRONG. However, this is mitigated by being able to sort by date and hope it gets the right year, although it WILL fall down when an Artist releases more than one album in the same year. But anyway…
The insurmountable problem however is the playing order. If you try to play everything by an artist, it ignores the selected sort order of the Albums and plays ‘Newest first’. This makes no sense. Either provide an alternative control to set the play order, or ensure it follows the order in which the albums are displayed.
These are thoughtless errors. When writing the code, it’s simply typing the name of one field or another. The right one, or the wrong one. Unfortunately in these cases, the Plex developer(s) chose the wrong one. Any chance we can get this corrected?
