I’ve spent so many hours correcting and cleaning up ID3 tags over the years and after finding the Plex Premium view for a music library kept reusing incorrect album art covers I had to switch back to just a plain library.
After deleting the premium library and creating a plain library everything looked great at first then I noticed the Sort Artist field has things all messed up. Aretha Franklin is now located in the F’s when viewing All, Artists, By Title. This can manually be modified inside of Plex yet after all the time I’ve put in to having proper names in the tags I’m about to loose my F’ing mind!
How does the field Sort Artist come in to existence in Plex? Is it from Lastfm or what? There is an extended ID3 tag for it however NONE of my tags are using that field.
How can this preference be changed to just use the name of the Artist field?
Can I delete the library again, do something extra to the files, then create it again so this doesn’t come back?
I’ve used Mp3Tag for years and never had any issues or ever needed to get in to some items that are a bit overly niche like this but you hit the nail on the head.
After having read many similar posts that didn’t have a decent solution I’ll post what I did.
Using Mp3Tag I identified the issue was inside the ID3 tags by:
Highlight a track with the issue, right click select Export, edit the default config ‘txt_taglist’ to include artistsort. As below.
This output showed the artistsort field that was the modified naming convention. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black - Rehab - 1/11 - 2007 - - - Winehouse,Amy
Next, under Actions menu select Actions and create a new action and name it ‘Update ArtistSort’.
For Field type in “ARTISTSORT” and for Format String type in “%artist%”.
Save this action and test it on the track from above.
This will copy whatever is in the Artist field to the ArtistSort field.
Run the Export option again and verify the field has been updated on the file above. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black - Rehab - 1/11 - 2007 - - - Amy Winehouse
Once you’ve verified this worked…
Lastly, select all tracks and under the Actions menu select your newly created action and run it.
Now for me even after a Refresh All Metadata in Plex the sort order for Artists didn’t change.
A simple delete of the library and recreate of the library however did complete the new artist naming that
So I accidentally added a couple dozen tracks and did not correct the ArtistSort field. After doing so the library didn’t want to pick up the new ID3 tags so easy enough I deleted the library from Plex and re-added it. All artists showed up as desired 'First Last" name wise. However after 10-15 minutes as the library was nearing completion of adding all the artist artwork the order all changed back to how it was with ‘Last First’ name.
I verified the ArtistSort fields were ‘First Last’ but it did it anyways. I then deleted the library again and using MP3Tag just removed all the ArtistSort fields completely. Created the library again and used the Plex Pass option for added artwork and pointed it to the music folder. Again at first all looked great but then after 10-15 minutes Plex re-ordered all the Artists with ‘Last First’ names.
I haven’t tried to delete the library again and not use the Plex Pass features but I would assume both standard and Plex Pass options would sort the same?
Any suggestions?
I would at this point just use Plex to update the files but going through 1323 current artists just isn’t a day I look forward to having. Note: For some reason only about 2-3% of artist artwork is being displayed even after a Refresh all Metadata. If I individually refresh a single cover then it updates but it doesn’t do so across the whole library on it’s own now. Clearing cache perhaps?
Below is a MP3Tag export showing an empty field for ArtistSort:
Format: %artist% - %album% - %title% - %track% - %year% - %genre% - %comment% - %artistsort%
Export:
Lily Allen - F*ck You - Face the Fear - 2/2 - 2009-07-13 - - -
Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You - F*ck You - 8/12 - 2009-02-10 - - -
Lily Allen - Lily Allen - Smile - - - - -
Have you thought about giving your embedded meta tags priority over data from the online sources?
You do that by:
tick the checkbox ‘Use embedded metatags’ in the properties of your library
drag the line ‘Local Media Assets’ downwards, so it ends up below of ‘last.fm’ or ‘Plex Premium Music’ respectively in
Settings - Server - Agents - Artists - last.fm/Premium Music
I’ve made those changes and it’ll take another 10 minutes to finish scanning things again.
Question: If local data takes precedence and ArtistSort is blank wouldn’t it pull that info then from Gracenote’s metadata? Odds are Gracenote is going to have the ArtistSort file listed as Allan, Lily because it’s more grammatically correct.
Will know more when it finishes but seems like I may need to then add back the ArtistSort field with Mp3tag for this to work well.
Also, since Plex is accessing Gracenote any possible plans to use it to update the ID3 tags for each file? I can’t seem to find any sort of decent ID3 tag editor that is using Gracenote due to licensing costs but Gracenote is simply the best out there for acoustic lookups.
Thankfully not. I’d hate it if it did that. I’m running my premium library that way since it was introduced. Since none of the online metadata sources has it “right”.
The ‘search title’ is just copied straight from the regular title/name.
I can see that. After Winamp died and lost it’s ties with Gracenote pretty much all replacement ID3 tagging software that can analyze a song seems to put 60% or more of tracks in to some darn compilation album. Ex. The Best of the '90s. and not an album actually produced by the artist.
So I’ve deleted the library and brought it back as a standard music library. Artist artwork is now coming in and is currently sorted by First Last name as desired. I’ll give it a while for it to finish and will check to see if the ArtistSort issue returns or not.
As for the Premium functions would it help if the ID3 tag Album was blank? Thinking that Gracenote gets the acoustic ID info and on it’s own properly organizes each track?
Gotcha, wow even Gracenote needs to step it up a notch with some things it looks like. Besides most people having moved to streaming music services people who buy whole albums is almost a thing of the past. It’s too easy to Shazam a song then only go and buy that one track. CD sales are back down to where they were in 1986.
Back to the topic:
Saw a large shifting of the artist tiles and Plex just re-sorted all the artists again by last name instead of first name. Again with the ArtistSort field being blank.
Any ideas?
So it’s not all of the tracks. Aretha Franklin was sorted by the last name but Frank Black, Frank Sinatra, and Freedy Johnston are sorted by first name.
Will do. Will probably be sometime tomorrow then for it to finish. As seen Plex is getting new ArtistSort data from somewhere as the file field is blank but Plex now has one.
Yeah, that’s what this list is a compilation of, every song that I’ve liked since I was ~5 year old till now. So many one hit wonders and odd ball tracks that we all knew but would have never guessed the band’s name.
ID3 Tags:
Aretha Franklin - Lady Soul - Chain of Fools (unedited version) - 11/14 - 1995 - - -
Aretha Franklin - Respect - Respect - 1/24 - - - -
I’ll do it and post it tomorrow. I was able to view the edit Artist window, tested Dobie Gray, and saw it listed as Dobie Gray but then after the artwork came in the Sort Artist field changed to Gray, Dobie.
Yet using Mp3tag viewing that field it is still blank. Dobie Gray - Drift Away - Drift Away - 1/11 - 1973 - - -
So it appears obvious now that the format/artistsort field is coming from Last.fm.
If I create a standard music library, choose use embedded tags, and select Personal Agent then the ArtistSort field is used and things are sorted that way (First Name Last Name). HOWEVER, no artist or missing album art will get downloaded since Last.fm is no longer in the picture.
If I create a standard music library, choose use embedded tags, and select Last.fm agent, and in settings set local media data to the top most position under agent settings then at first all artists are sorted properly because local ID3 data is read first. Then afterwords the artist is searched for on Last.fm’s server and IT returns the artistsort field data and plex updates with it anyways even if the artistsort field is embedded. So the rearranging of Last.fm and personal media data under agents doesn’t seem to have an effect anymore.
In the end this makes sense because unless you create a separate file to be used for the artist artwork then where is the Artist data, bio, history, etc coming from but Last.fm or Premium Plex servers. Within the mp3’s ID3 data artistsort may be present but that data is for that track and that track only. It is possible to have two tracks with one/the same Artist but different ArtistSort fields. So which track’s data should Plex use to sort Artists with? It chooses neither and instead gets that data from online servers.
Besides Plex not giving an option to change this the online server data is inconsistent. Franck Pourcel’s artistsort field is “Franck Pourcel” & Gary Numan’s artistsort field is “Gary Numan” however Aretha Franklin’s artist sort field is “Franklin, Aretha” All artist names are real people’s names besides also being the ‘band’ name. Looks like Plex would have to parse all artistsort fields and look for a comma “,” then swap the text on either side of the comma if they were to build in an option but this will probably never happen.
Looks like manual sorting inside of plex is the only way. It’s not a big deal as the music plays and the artwork is nice but to a real music fan it’s irritating as hell and makes me want to keep plex for movies but find a better jukebox/music setup.
You are correct it was in another ‘hidden’ field that just doesn’t show easily in Mp3tag. For some reason ArtistSort is NOT the field used for sorting artists but due to the name that was the field I kept mucking with or clearing out. Changing ArtistSort for me had no effect but changing AlbumArtistSort did. Even worked for Marky Mark. (grin)
So for Mp3tag users:
Create an Action named ‘Set Sort Fields’
Then add the following actions.
Remove fields "ALBUMSORT;COMPOSERSORT;TITLESORT;ARTISTSORT;ALBUMARTISTSORT"
Format value "ALBUMSORT": $regexp(%artist%,'^The ',)
Format value "COMPOSERSORT": $regexp(%artist%,'^The ',)
Format value "ARTISTSORT": $regexp(%artist%,'^The ',)
Format value "ALBUMARTISTSORT": $regexp(%artist%,'^The ',)
This new action will clear out any sort fields possible then will copy the current Artist field to each of the main sort fields without the "The " at the beginning IF it has it. This can be stripped down to only the last action since Plex uses AlbumArtistSort for default sorting of music libraries when embedded tags are used and viewing by Artist Title.
Still had to use a Standard Library and not Plex Premium since there are very few whole albums in this library and acoustic fingerprinting seems to needs them.
