Server Version#: 1.29.2.6364
Player Version#: PlexAmp 4.5.3 (but across players)
I want my music directory to be sorted by surname. I had figured out looking through forums here that the ALBUMARTISTSORT tag was the right tag to be using to do this (i.e., if I have ALBUM ARTIST as ‘Elvis Presley’ but ALBUMARTISTSORT has ‘Presley, Elvis’, Plex knows to sort Elvis Presley to be next to Prince rather than next to Elton John. As of a few updates ago - maybe in July or so - this seemed to stop working, and I’ve had to manually change names in the sort artist field in the Plex dialog, which I’d prefer not to do given how many artists there are in my library. Is my ALBUMARTISTSORT tag not the right one to be using? Is this a bug?
I am using foobar2000 to add/update the tag, and these are mp3 files that should be using id3v2.3.
The
ALBUMARTISTSORT
meta tag will only be read when the artist is added the first time to the Plex library.
After that, you change it in your file infinite times, it won’t change in Plex.
Thanks OttoKerner - that’s interesting to know, and might explain a couple of things.
I tried deleting and then recreating a plex library I have with my same settings (including ‘prefer local metadata’, just to be clear) to see whether it was about the artist being added for the first time. But unfortunately, after doing that, Neneh Cherry, e.g., still appears to be sorted under N rather than C, despite definitely having ‘cherry, neneh’ as the album sort. I habitually have all artist names uncapitalised, and the artist name is appearing as ‘neneh cherry’ - so it’s reading from local metadata…it’s just seemingly not reading the metadata in ALBUMARTISTSORT and transferring it to the sort artist field. I feel that it used to do this correctly before an update, and it’s the way it handles the metadata rather than the metadata that has changed.
Well, the thing is: it’s a tag within a track.
So, all tracks of all albums which use Neneh Cherry as their album artist must have an identically populated Albumartistsort tag in them. Because it is kinda random, which track is used to create the artist record in the Plex database.
Yep, so with Neneh Cherry for example, all of the tracks are from the same album, and when I formatted the tags for that album in foobar2000, I inserted the ALBUMARTISTSORT tag on all tracks. But it still seems to be showing up under N rather than C. So I don’t think inconsistency in tagging will be the issue here.
I’m fairly new to tagging audio in Plex, but from just trying to load my music and using Picard to help me tag albums correctly, I noticed at least two sort tags, e.g.
metaflac --list --block-type=VORBIS_COMMENT "/Volumes/Audio/Live/Aretha Franklin/Aretha in Paris/06 - Groovin'.flac"
METADATA block #2
type: 4 (VORBIS_COMMENT)
is last: false
length: 1142
vendor string: reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101
comments: 37
comment[0]: ACOUSTID_ID=64472f33-8568-4987-897d-1ff4e1b8f34a
comment[1]: ALBUM=Aretha in Paris
comment[2]: ALBUMARTIST=Aretha Franklin
comment[3]: ALBUMARTISTSORT=Franklin, Aretha
comment[4]: ARTIST=Aretha Franklin
comment[5]: ARTISTS=Aretha Franklin
comment[6]: ARTISTSORT=Franklin, Aretha
comment[7]: ASIN=B0000033FZ
comment[8]: CATALOGNUMBER=8207
Maybe you can make some tests on your hardware to see how those propagate.
sorting rant hidden
I absolutely hate artist sorting. I wish the whole industry would just leave every name as is and never touch an article, like The. If they want to call themselves The Beatles, that’s the fricken name. Rolling Stones, Peter Tosh, I don’t care.
@nibbles btw… let me pass this along in case its of help to you regarding sorting. It was something that I struggled with when I started moving my media to plex. What I do now using Musicbrainz picard is set the sorting to albumartist for both the artistsort and albumartistsort. Basically like this …
… which makes stuff like Beatles, The become The Beatles. Then plex dance the artist in plex (if they exist already) and sorting will be correct, at least as I want it
Anyhow, your mileage may vary depending on your actual needs and desires.
MP3 uses ID3tags.
FLAC uses Vorbis comments.
Vorbis comments are a lot more flexible as you can see from the example above – which can be both a blessing and a curse.
@hillsonghoods Have you tried to adjust ARTISTSORT and unless there’s multiple artists, make the ALBUMARTISTSORT identical to it?
Been trying to figure that out since it was posted.
FLAC uses VORBIS Comments to store tags.
MP3 uses ID3v2 frames to store tags.
ID3v2 Specifications
The current ID3v2 standard, ID3v2.4.0, was also the first revision to add any sort tags.
Three were added:
4.2.5 TSOA Album sort order
4.2.5 TSOP Performer sort order
4.2.5 TSOT Title sort order
I guess it’s a matter of how PMS is coded to deal with each type of tag.
Below I’ll look at a song’s tags, once for the MP3 and once for the FLAC, of a retail album known to Musicbrainz. I first removed all the tags from both using Kid3, verified that with ffprobe then tagged with Picard. Focus on any tag that relates to sorting.
Tagging a track with Picard and reading with ffprobe
the MP3 version
nib$ ffprobe -hide_banner -i "02 - Don't Let Me Lose This Dream.mp3" 2>&1 | sed '1,2d;/Duration/,$d' | sort -f
album : Aretha in Paris
album_artist : Aretha Franklin
artist : Aretha Franklin
artist-sort : Franklin, Aretha
ARTISTS : Aretha Franklin
ASIN : B0000033FZ
CATALOGNUMBER : 8207
date : 1968
disc : 1/1
genre : Soul
MusicBrainz Album Artist Id: 2f9ecbed-27be-40e6-abca-6de49d50299e
MusicBrainz Album Id: 0a3bb9a3-332f-4d37-95b9-c7cbf5c54039
MusicBrainz Album Release Country: US
MusicBrainz Album Status: official
MusicBrainz Album Type: album/live
MusicBrainz Artist Id: 2f9ecbed-27be-40e6-abca-6de49d50299e
MusicBrainz Release Group Id: 4877e1ad-bc17-3067-8d47-bd90f5478c08
MusicBrainz Release Track Id: 499dec97-1160-3ac5-9696-23d41e768194
originalyear : 1968
publisher : Atlantic
SCRIPT : Latn
title : Don't Let Me Lose This Dream
TMED : Vinyl
TORY : 1968
track : 2/13
TSO2 : Franklin, Aretha
TSRC : USAT20801138
the FLAC version
ALBUM : Aretha in Paris
ALBUMARTISTSORT : Franklin, Aretha
album_artist : Aretha Franklin
ARTIST : Aretha Franklin
ARTISTS : Aretha Franklin
ARTISTSORT : Franklin, Aretha
ASIN : B0000033FZ
CATALOGNUMBER : 8207
DATE : 1968-10
disc : 1
DISCTOTAL : 1
GENRE : Soul
ISRC : USAT20801138
LABEL : Atlantic
MEDIA : Vinyl
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: 2f9ecbed-27be-40e6-abca-6de49d50299e
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID: 0a3bb9a3-332f-4d37-95b9-c7cbf5c54039
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID: 2f9ecbed-27be-40e6-abca-6de49d50299e
MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID: 4877e1ad-bc17-3067-8d47-bd90f5478c08
MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASETRACKID: 499dec97-1160-3ac5-9696-23d41e768194
MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID: ff52a044-5bc8-4481-a172-7081c519b6fd
ORIGINALDATE : 1968-10
ORIGINALYEAR : 1968
RELEASECOUNTRY : US
RELEASESTATUS : official
RELEASETYPE : album;live
SCRIPT : Latn
TITLE : Don't Let Me Lose This Dream
TOTALDISCS : 1
TOTALTRACKS : 13
track : 2
TRACKTOTAL : 13
To help see the differences, I made a table.
Where there’s a - indicates the following: on that song Musicbrainz had no tag.
ID3 Name
ID3 TAG
on an MP3
on a FLAC
Examples
Album sort order
TSOA
-
-
White Album, The
Performer sort order
TSOP
artist-sort
ARTISTSORT
Franklin, Aretha
Title sort order
TSOT
-
-
Backseat, In The
Album Artist Sort Order
???
TS02
ALBUMARTISTSORT
Franklin, Aretha
You can see from the specifications that the last tag is not in spec.
Yet that’s what Picard wrote. Plex is probably coded to recognize TSO2
and there you go. Darnit Otto that bugged me enough to sed
Thanks so much for having a play with this nibbles - is it the case for you if you use the TS02 tag from Picard on an mp3 as the only artist sorting mechanism that you see the Aretha album under F rather than A in Plex?
I did a Plex dance with a solo artist with one album (manually move the files elsewhere, scan files, empty trash in plex), and inserted a TS02 tag in foobar2000 with ‘lastname, surname’ before putting the files back. No luck unfortunately. However, when I tried the same thing with ARTIST-SORT with the hyphen, it DID work. So thank you for figuring that one out!
The album was “Aretha in Paris” and so I don’t expect to see that “album under F rather than A” seeing as albums are sorted by album title in the default view.
You ask specifically about TSO2 alone. I’ve not seen that, nor had I seen the words TSO2 until today. I am 99% a FLAC person. Clearly Musicbrainz used it on that show. Analyzing only one album isn’t a good plan tbh.
What I can tell you is I almost always see ARTIST=ALBUMARTIST
and more and more I’m seeing sort tags too, where ARTISTSORT=ALBUMARTISTSORT
because compilations aren’t what I collect.
We were told that some sorts only registered once like artistsort.
As long as you test a lot. I think you’ll find a good solution.
TSO2 is not in the id3v2.4 standard, it was added by Apple twenty years ago, when they started (ab)using the TPE2 frame for Album Artist in iTunes (version 3.0 I think).
It’s been around so long that it’s now a de-facto standard. Normally stuff like that (also, Apple-introduced tags like Movement Name/Index MVNM/MVIN, Grouping GRP1, Compilation TCMP etc) would have been formalized in an id3v2.5 or something, but after v2.4 in 2000 it has all gone silent on the id3 front.
Vorbis Comments (FLAC) are not standardized at all, it’s a total free-for-all: if you want to use ALBUMARTISTSORT or SORTALBUMARTIST or ALBUM ARTIST SORT (with spaces) as the field name, nothing’s stopping you.
I don’t understand all the console looking posts for tagging that are above. that said, I sort my library the way the original poster wants and it works for me when I do this.
Aritst tag: Liz Phair
AlbumArtistTag: Phair, Liz
When Plex imports the first album/albums tagged like this, it will show correctly as “Phair, Liz” and as of some update the past few months, it won’t actually match anything. What I do is manually, in plex change the name fields to look like this:
And then match it. so far doing this with 1000+ artists and bands it will hold. This is a mix of FLAC and MP3.
The exception is various artist tags which I refuse/hate to use, but I find that if you match an album under the cursed Various Artist, and then manually change the “Artist” field for that album in plex to the same name as a previously “matched” artist, it will stick there. Same with albums that may be a side project for a band but should really be under a solo artist, that kind of thing. So far anyway but I imaging an update will probably break it again.
