The sort title for those pictured items is ‘Zappa, Frank’. How do I get the circled item to sort correctly (alphabetically)? I’ve spent way too much time trying to get this fixed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
When looking at the grid view of the movies in question, click the little button that appears in the lower left corner to bring up the edit screen. There will be two title fields for each movie.
The Title field is what will display below the movie
The Sort Title field is what Plex will use to put it in order, but will not display. You can force things to be in whatever order you like this way.
@AmazingRando24 said:
When looking at the grid view of the movies in question, click the little button that appears in the lower left corner to bring up the edit screen. There will be two title fields for each movie.
The Title field is what will display below the movie
The Sort Title field is what Plex will use to put it in order, but will not display. You can force things to be in whatever order you like this way.
That’s the first thing I tried (see No. 1 above) The problem is that everything else sorts correctly except for the few obstinate items. You can see that the titles go from ‘You Can’t…’ to ‘Zappa Restoration…’ but then to ‘A pioneer…’ that is to say from Y, to Z and then back to A. The sort title is identical for all those items. Also close to 30 other titles sort correctly when set up the same way.
I guess the question becomes what does the sorting fall back to if the sort terms are the same?
Perhaps check your “space dash space” in not only this file, but the others as well to make sure they’re all equal. You’re right though… You’ve tried all the proper solutions, so it’s likely something small.
Unfortunately, I have been going through these with a fine tooth comb and doing a lot of copy/paste to ensure everything is the same (especially with the ones that won’t behave). My brain hurts!
So I think I may have stumbled onto the answer -> there doesn’t seem to be a fallback for sorting if the ‘sort title’ is the same on two different items. It seems to be appended to the end of the list of those items with those search items (LILO). Not a great system, but at least I found out what was keeping my library untidy.
Step one is to use the ‘Personal Media Agent’ - not The Movie Database or Plex Movie. None (that I found) are even listed at TMDB, so unless you add them to TMDB listings you’re going to be in a constant battle with Plex - that you should avoid at all costs… because you can’t win.
When you use the Personal Media Agent, Plex will stop trying (and failing) to match with an online database.
Once you use the Personal Media Agent on all of your Frank Movies the Sort Title Field will be:
Frank Zappa 01
or
Frank Zappa 1970 <— or whatever year
or
Frank Zappa ‘The Name of The Thing’
or something like that.
You can’t just use ‘Frank Zappa’. You need something else after that to put them in order.
So since these are in a movie library, won’t changing the agents affect ALL movie libraries and prevent movies (in other movie libraries) listed in TMDB from getting metadata info?
So, don’t see ‘Fix Match’, but ‘Match…’ gives me the option to choose Personal Media Agent for a particular item. I’m not sure I’m battling incorrect matches, as I suspect that the ‘Fix Match’ option would be available if PLEX had already tried to match an item. I think it is the fact that there is no fallback criteria for sorting, like title, to act as a ‘tie-breaker’ when items have the identical sort titles.
p.s. I realy appreciate you taking the time to give me some help on this issue, thanks.
Yes, you’re right. Fix Match is to fix a bad match. Match is used when one hasn’t been achieved.
Regardless - Personal Media Agent will head off potential battles. Now all you need to do is come up with a suitable Sort Title Field and you’re good to go.
I would research your material and add a correct (YEAR) field to the file names. That way, if they ever do become available at TMDB and you should happen to want to, you can flip back to TMDB and get good matches. In the meantime, while using Personal Media Agent you can use:
‘Frank Zappa 1970’ - or whatever - as the Sort Title Field and they’ll all be lined up right where they need to be - regardless of their actual name.
For instance - in my ‘Sci-Fi Sets’ Library - or any other library where a Sort Title Field is used - to get my Star Treks all lined up I simply use:
‘Star Trek 1979’
For ‘The Motion Picture’ - and so on… ‘Star Trek’ puts them all together and the year is easy (cause it’s right there on the page I’m working in).
In the rare event two movies come out in the same year - add the month - or in the case I have ‘Split’ my two versions of Star Wars (1977) - The Sort Title for the theatrical is ‘Star Wars 1977 1’ and for the Harmy’s Version, ‘Star Wars 1977 2’ . Done.
