I just noticed something strange, I couldn’t understand that I didn’t have my Robbie Williams CD’s not showing up, so I tried searching, and in the search he appears, but not under artists. I hope Plex haven’t added quality control, and RW has fallen under the bar of being an artist?
Enter the artist from your search results.
Then ‘edit’ the artist.
Look what it says in the ‘sort title’ field.
I have a hunch it may say ‘Williams, Robin’, so he appears under ‘W’.
Ahaaa, you are absolutely right, and that also goes for the danish band Tøsedrengene.
It was apparently sorted after T0sedrengene, which is completely bonkers.
I’ve corrected the Tøsedrengene to Toesedrengene (not sure if it has problems with the danish letters), as that is at least understandable.
You might want to inspect the embedded meta tags of your files.
There is actually a meta tag for ‘artist sort title’. Apparently the file of this particular artist which got added first into Plex has this weird sort title stored in it.
mp3tag will show artistsort (not artist sort title) if you set it up to do so or you can right click and use the extended tags option to display all tags in the file. The tag you want to look at is albumartistsort in any case as Plex prefers albumartist and to artist. The actual underlying tag name will be dependent on the file type you are using as mp3, m4a/mp4 and flac all use different tagging standards.
(Album) Artist sort is in my view not some weird thing but actually very useful as it put things in what I consider to be the correct order. But then I shelve my books by authors surname.
I think the ‘weird’ refers to using the number 0 instead of the letter Ø.
I don’t see the ‘t0sedrengene’ tag anywhere in their files. I wonder if mp3tag has cleaned it out?
mp3tag doesn’t delete tags unless you tell it to so I doubt that got rid of it. I guess it’s possible that Plex is adding the sort tag you found to deal with multiple languages but that seems unlikely and a poor way to do it.
One problem I find with Plex is once it has a bit of metadata it is hard to get rid of it. You could try adding an albumartistsort and seeing if Plex takes what you have set it to.
Unless it has been updated recently then this doesn’t work for flac files which is one reason why I ended up writing my own version of the local media plugin.
I’ve tried going through a lot of artists and albums now, it’s definetely plex doing this.
As soon as it sees an ø, it is changed to 0 in the sorting field. Darn that’s a lot of work cleaning that mess up.