I’m trying to understand how Plex is sorting music in my library. Two examples: I have an album of Aaron Copland’s Greatest Hits, and Plex is displaying that in the “A” section of the library. I have an album from The Beatles, and Plex is showing that in the “B” section of the library. I’m guessing this is something obvious, but I have looked around and can’t find any guidance so far. Thanks in advance for any help out there.
The sorting order is by default strictly alphabetical.
So Aaron Copland would appear under A.
The Beatles appearing under B is due to an common bibliographic rule which removes common articles (i.e. “The” in this case) to create a “sorting title”.
Otherwise, a library would have an unproportionally high amount of items under the letter T (if you are predominantly dealing with English titles).
This rule can be adapted or disabled via a hidden server preference.
Another possibility are embedded meta tags for the Artist sorting order in your files. If Plex has been set to “prefer embedded meta data”, it will import the sorting order from the metatags of the first album imported of that artist.
Musicbrainz Picard is one of the apps which by default write these type of tags. And it regularly uses the strict lexicographic method of reversing the order of surname and firstname, so you end up with e.g. “Copland, Aaron” as sorting title.
Thank you, Otto. I am happy with Plex’s treatment of The Beatles (of course). I do use Musicbrainz Picard. I checked the tags on the Copland album. The actual album title for this particular album is “Copland: Greatest Hits”, I don’t see any instance of Aaron Copland in the meta data. I also don’t see a tag for AlbumSort, which I thought might be triggering it. There is a composer tag value, which is “Copland,Aaron (1900-1990)”.
This is not so much about the AlbumTitle as more about AlbumArtist.
See [HowTo] Music Organizing with MusicBrainz Picard - #6 by OttoKerner if you want to take precaution and tell Picard to never write these types of tags.
Yes, so for this particular album, the AlbumArtist is “Eugene Ormandy; Philadelphia Orchestra”. If Picard is not detecting an AlbumSort field, is it still possible one exists? This Copland example is one of hundreds in my library. Just trying to get a bead on how/what Plex is seeing to cause this sorting behaving, essentially by artist first name.
Please show how this album is now sorted and how you are expecting it to be sorted.
So you want to reverse the surname and first name of the album artist?
Ending up with “Copland, Aaron” as the sorting name?
Yes, correct, but in this particular example, Copland is not the AlbumArtist, at least not the one showing in the album meta data.
Then you’ll have to override that using embedded metatags.
Overriding things on Musicbrainz.org with your own meta tags works only if you enable “prefer local metatags” in the properties.
Thanks. Feels like I am still missing something. I took another album, Annie Lenox “Bare”, loaded the files into MusicBrainz, set both the Artist and Composer fields to “Lenox, Annie”, saved the files, Plex still displays them under “Annie Lenox”. Is that due to not having “prefer local metatags” in the properties? If so, I also can’t find where to make that change to the settings.
Looking at some older posts, it seems like there used to be a more direct way to tell Plex how to sort things. Do you know if that functionality was removed?
Don’t.
The AlbumArtistSort tag is a different one than the AlbumArtist tag.
You don’t want the name of that artist to be shown as “Lennox, Annie”. You only want her to be sorted as if she was named like that.
Once an artist has been initially created in the Plex database, you cannot change anything about that artist with embedded metatags.
Only if the AlbumArtistSort tag is there when the first album by that artist is added to your Plex server, will Plex read it.
And the above is only valid if “prefer local metatags” is activated.
You must be mistaken. There never was a way to switch Firstname and Surname of artists other than described above.
Okay, understood on point 1, that makes sense.
So to get Plex to “re-read” that info, I will first need to delete it from the library and then add-it back in?
And where do I set the “prefer local metatags” option?
Probably, yes. But it may even take a week inbetween deleting the artist and re-adding it, for Plex to “forget” anything about that artist. That has to do with the various automatic database clean up jobs of which some are only performed weekly.
In the properties of the music library, on the Advanced tab.
But before you do that, you need to check this and make sure that each and every album in your library is conforming to it. Otherwise, activating that option may create havoc in your library:
/Music
/AlbumArtist One
/Albumtitle1
01 - Tracktitle.mp3
02 - Tracktitle.mp3
03 - Tracktitle.mp3
...
/Albumtitle2
01 - Tracktitle.mp3
02 - Tracktitle.mp3
03 - Tracktitle.mp3
...
/AlbumArtist Two
/Albumtitle1
01 - Tracktitle.mp3
02 - Tracktitle.mp3
03 - Tracktitle.mp3
...
/Albumtitle2
01 - Tracktitle.mp3
02 - Tracktitle.mp3
03 - Tracktitle.mp3
...
This folder structure applies to all items in your library.
Explicitly to all sampler and compilation-type of albums as well!
And very important: in each of these AlbumArtist folders must be only albums where the AlbumArtist metatag has been filled with identical content.
If you don’t follow this rule, then the AlbumArtist of all albums may be overridden by even the sole album with a deviant AlbumArtist.
Yikes. Okay sounds like I am going to live with Plex sorting things by FirstName_LastName. 
Thanks for the help, though.
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