Weird alphabetical ordering of artists in music library

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488
Player Version#: 3.77.4 (Web Client)

For whatever reason, I can’t get my music ordered alphabetically by first name of artist. It’s doing some weird alphabetical order that jumps between first and last name of the album artist metadata.

It happened when I edited the metadata for the files.

Ordering in Plex Server:

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Metadata (ordered by Album Artist, the same tag that Plex Server is supposed to order by):

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Does anyone have any idea why Plex would fail to order them correctly?

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Edit ‘Cody Johnson’ for instance.
You will probably find that the field ‘Sort Artist’ actually contains ‘Johnson, Cody’.
This is contained in the embedded metadata of at least one of your files.

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Thanks! That was the problem. Unfortunately, finding where to edit that field wasn’t as straightforward as actually editing the value once it was found. So here’s a detailed explanation of how to fix it below for anyone else who might need it:

From @OttoKerner’s reply, I was still unsure where I had to edit the tags (In the Plex Player UI? Plex Web Client? On the .mp3 file itself using File Explorer or some other App?)

I started by trying to edit the track itself in the Plex UI, but that didn’t help. There was no “Sorted Artist” field. So instead I thought it was maybe another tag on the mp3 file itself. But I couldn’t find anything there indicating how to sort it.

Turns out you edit the artist in the Plex UI. So, here are the steps to resolve the problem (using the Plex Web Client) for anyone with this issue in the future:

  1. Open your Music Library
  2. Change it from Grid View to List View
  3. Hover over the Artist that’s out of order and click the edit button (looks like a pencil)
  4. Edit the “Sorted Artist” field mentioned by @OttoKerner.

That was all it took for me.

1 Like
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Sorry for being vague.
The source of the issue lies within your files. From there, Plex did read the Sort Artist value and incurred it into its own database.
The quick solution is to edit the Artist within Plex, yes.

But to prevent it from happening again, (in case have to re-create your Plex database) you will also have to remove the ‘artist sort’ meta tag from your music files.

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Ah interesting. When I checked the tags and didn’t see any of them with that metadata field, I assumed that perhaps one of the Agents was providing that to the Plex database.

Not sure why, but I’m unable to find “artist sort” nor “Sort Artist” anywhere there. But I’ll keep an eye out.

Thank you for your help!

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