Sort order

General Discussions
21

Returning to this topic now I have my iTunes link working and all my content now in Plex. I have to say, it’s looking good. But sorting might still be an issue.

I specified for the music library that I wanted ‘oldest first’, in the initial library setup. I’m not really sure what that is supposed to control however. If I view by Album, can I not select the sort order on that page? Anyway…

I show the whole collection by Artist and they do seem to all follow the Sort (Album) Artist tags I have so laboriously configured. If I then select an artist, I am delighted to see all the albums apparently in chronological order. Is this the library setting above, or is it simply using the Sort Album tag/field which I configure to ensure correct release date order? Whatever, it is correct. But…

If I then try to play all tracks (play button at top left of Artist display) it plays the first track of the LATEST album, then the next track and presumably then works through the albums in the reverse order of how they are displayed. First of all, is this simply a bug and they forgot to sort the albums by the same criteria as for the actual display, or is there a way to change this? Is this the AlbumSort value stored in prefs? In which case…

How do I set that? I’m not being completely dumb here, but I would need to know the exact field name used by Plex for the Sort Album tag so I can ‘defaults write… etc’ and I have no idea what name Plex might use, or of how I could otherwise find out. Any documentation on this?

I tried a defaults read on AlbumSort but apparently it does not exist. So what value is Plex using and why is that not stored in prefs? Are the prefs just used to override hard coded options?

So, can I use the prefs AlbumSort option to control the album order when playing all tracks of an artist, is that what it’s for and how can I ascertain the field names it uses so I can set it how I want? Anyone?

@beckfield said:

@OttoKerner said:

@UKenGB said:

Sorting albums in reverse order is utterly incomprehensible to me and …Is there no way to correct this?

Not currently.

Yes there is. Take a look at this Help page.

22

I spoke too soon and I take it all back. It’s a train wreck. The Album sort option in a Library’s settings, the small pop up menu Newest/Oldest/By Name controls the order in which an artist’s albums are sorted, but what date is it using for an album? No idea and it makes no sense if taken from the tracks as every track might have a different [year] tag and there’s no such thing as Album Release Date in ID3 tags. So what is Plex using? Seems to be some sort of approximation based on the different dates the tracks may have. Or something, who knows, who cares, it’s not a valid sort as they’re making it up. I don’t want ‘made up’. I want the EXACT data I have placed in the tags. Which brings me to the third option in that sort menu.

By Name. Ha, that should be what I need as the Sort Album tag of all my music contains the EXACT data required to sort the albums in true chronological order. The sort variant of the Album tag is preceded by the YEAR and MONTH so it avoids any conflicts of multiple albums within one year (never heard of more than one album within the same month), so when any list of albums is sorted by Name, they should be sorted chronologically. In this way, even when using the column browser in iTunes, the list of albums in the Albums pane is sorted chronologically and as that is only an appropriate access method for the albums of any one artist, it all works and has worked for years, perfectly. But…

In their infinite wisdom (note the HEAVY sarchasm), Plex sort an album list by the Album tag and NOT the Sort Album tag. So this means I cannot actually sort an artist’s albums in the right order. I can sort by date, oldest or newest first, but that simply gets it wrong as in many cases it makes up an entirely inappropriate date for an album. Or I can sort the albums alphabetically which as I’ve opined before here and elsewhere is utterly useless.

I am so angry about this. It’s so damned simple to present music in the right way for all users. Why do developers keep getting it wrong. This has blown all my faith in Plex. Just when I thought I had it all sorted and it was all going so well.

If I’m wrong and Plex can actually be configured to sort albums by the Sort Album tag (so obvious really isn’t it), please speak up.

23

I’ll stick to this topic as the problems are still largely to do with list sorting.

I set the AlbumSort pref using defaults write… Since it seemed to make no difference, I have no idea what it is supposed to actually do. Anyone?

However, I then noticed (but I suspect unrelated) that when viewing a Music Library by Artist, each had a time since added displayed below the poster. I checked other, different Music Libraries and most were the same with an “Added 2 days ago” or similar below the poster and also, the entire Artist list was sorted by that date. But in one Music Library, there was no such date/time display and the artists were sorted by their Sort Artist tag, as they should. I don’t mind having different sort options, good idea in fact, but I do want to be able to choose which is being used and try as I might, I could not find any option to alter this behaviour. I then discovered that by selecting to sort by Album instead and immediately back to Artist, the date/time since added was no longer displayed and the Artists were now correctly sorted by their Sort Artist tag.

So what’s going on here? First of all, why does it switch to a different sort order and how is one supposed to control which is being used? There seems to be be no way to control this. I must be missing something here.

There there are the Artists in completely the wrong place. When I check their data, I find that the Sort Artist is set the same as the Artist. But in the actual file itself, these tags are NOT the same. I re-checked the file and sure enough, the tags are still correct. So somehow, when adding these files (simply set up new Library and pointed to the folder), Plex occasionally misses a tag and inserts some other data. Well I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t find that acceptable. Software should NOT make these occasional mistakes. Each Library was specifically configured to read the embedded metadata tags. How can it then simply decided to sometimes NOT do that.

After some further editing with several Artists to correct what Plex has simply got WRONG, I find another problem. In some cases it is NOT making use of the cover.jpg artwork that is located in the same directory as the tracks. In one case I ‘edited’ the album and in the the ‘poster’ section, the one I wanted was there and available. I selected it and all is good. But in another case, the artwork that I know exists in that folder is simply not shown by Plex and hence cannot be used. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to throw the whole lot in the bin. I want to display a particular image file, but for some reason Plex has not used it, but then for some reason it can’t find the image file that is there, in the correct location for it to use. What could be simpler. List all the image files in that folder for the user to pick one. How hard can that be. Not at all of course.

So what the hell is Plex playing at. No way to play all of an artist’s tracks in the most logical order, sort preferences that have no effect, bizarre sorting of Artists and Albums in a library with no way to control it, tag data replaced with data from different tags, artwork wrong and not able to allow the user to pick the right artwork even when the image file is exactly where it is supposed to be. To say I’m disappointed would be putting it mildly. This is stuff that a mature product like Plex should have fixed years ago. What is going on.

Of course I am open to suggestions about how any of the above can be corrected.

24

Still hoping someone can help me find an answer to why what appears to be about 5% of all the music Artists do not have the correct Sort Artist data. It’s in the files’ tags, so why does PMS apparently randomly duplicate it from the Artist tag instead. Makes no sense.

I have probably nearly 2,000 artists in my music libraries. So 5% means about 100 artists that have been screwed up by Plex. Do I spend the huge amount of time tracking them down and fixing the data, or do I simply delete the libraries and start again, in which case, who’s to say it won’t be the same again, maybe worse?

Anyone got any idea why it’s got this so wrong?

25

@OttoKerner said:
Confirmed for FLAC files. SortAlbum is also not imported, btw.
Will file a bug report.

Thank you so much for posting this - this is my first time using Plex, and really my first time properly ripping my CDs (I am using dBpoweramp with FLAC Uncompressed.) I thought I was going crazy when the sort tags were never used! I have two questions:

  1. Would you know the status of this bug? I looked for a bug tracker/section but I didn’t find one yet.

  2. When it is fixed, should I be using the AlbumArtistSort, or the AlbumSort, given that I have used the Album Artist field for the name of the artist? (I learned to use AlbumArtist for the name of the classical music Composer since it seemed to be the only way to get that to work.)

Thanks!

26

@CherubRock said:

  1. Would you know the status of this bug? I looked for a bug tracker/section but I didn’t find one yet.

Nope. There is no public bug tracker.

  1. When it is fixed, should I be using the AlbumArtistSort, or the AlbumSort, given that I have used the Album Artist field for the name of the artist?

These are different things.
AlbumArtist Sort defines the position of this AlbumArtist among other AlbumArtists.
AlbumSort defines the postion of this Album among other Albums.

AlbumArtistSort makes limited sense within Plex, because which ever album is added into Plex defines this field. All other album which might have a different value set, will not change this.
So this will only be effective when a new AlbumArtist is added or when a whole collection with meticulously nursed metatags is added to a fresh Plex installation.

27

@OttoKerner said:
So this will only be effective when a new AlbumArtist is added or when a whole collection with meticulously nursed metatags is added to a fresh Plex installation.

Thank you, OttoKerner! I think what you are saying is that when the first album from an artist who is not yet in the library is added, that artist will get sorted (and I presume by the AlbumArtistSort tag) and this will be stored in Plex in such a way that subsequent albums by the same artist will not change that sort order. So if for example the AlbumArtistSort were defined initially as David Bowie and I added to the library, but then for a second album I made it Bowie, David and added that to the library, BOTH albums would be sorted under D (unless I fixed all tags and Plex-danced it.)

I will get it eventually :slight_smile:

Here is one more question based on your Frank Zappa example: you have Disc 1, Disc 2 showing up as headings, and I would like to do this too. For my example, I had the Vangelis 3-disc Blade Runner album originally ripped as 3 separate albums. I plex-danced them out, and edited tags to remove the Disc # from the album title, and restructured the file directory to have /Disc 1 , /Disc 2, /Disc 3 folders under the subfolder of Blade Runner, 25 Anniversary. I then plex-danced it back in. Everything is as I imagined it would be, but the “Disc #” headings are not appearing. Any idea why they are not there? If I click on the details in Plex it shows that it knows the Disc# are different.

635×380 136 KB

643×590 117 KB

28

@CherubRock said:
…this will be stored in Plex in such a way that subsequent albums by the same artist will not change that sort order. (unless I fixed all tags and Plex-danced it.)

You can override it manually, though, by editing the AlbumArtist.

Here is one more question. Everything is as I imagined it would be, but the “Disc #” headings are not appearing.

This is not a matching issue, but rather a cosmetic issue with the new web V3 app.
Nothing you can influence with tagging or naming.
You can still see your naming is working because the tracks are ordered in the right sequence from disc 1 to disc 2 and so on. Just the extra text Disc n is missing inbetween.