I’m trying to figure out why when I import my music library, certain artists “Sort Artist” field show up as “Last Name, First Name”, while others show up as “First Name, Last Name”.
What field in my mp3 tag is plex looking at to get this info, so I can be sure to set it? Is there a way to force the agent to default to “First Name, Last Name”?
Thanks
It’s looking at either Artist (TPE1) or Album Artist (TPE2) in your ID3 tags for this info.
There’s no setting in Plex to tell it to use Last, First. It’s kind of a difficult puzzle, because some artists aren’t a person’s name (Dire Straits, for example), and shouldn’t be sorted by Last, First.
I wrote up a feature request some time back about this.
So, in this case, the Artist is Neko Case. I look at the ID3 tags for her albums and see the following:
Yet, after importing into my Plex library, I get the following:
My library options look like this:
I did notice if I turn off the last.fm as the agent, then it brings the Sort Artist in unaltered. I didn’t think that using Last.fm would overwrite things if I had “Use embedded tags” set, however it appears that may be happening…
Hmm, for me, the Sort Artist tag is populated “First Last” regardless of the Agent setting. Weird.
In the case of the Sort Artist field, Nothing’s being ‘overwritten’ because Plex isn’t populating that field by just importing a tag. For instance, if you import an artist like “The Beatles,” Plex will automatically populate the Sort Artist field as “Beatles, The.” So it’s not a direct correlation to an ID3 tag - it’s a “calculated” field, if that makes sense.
The ‘Sort Artist’ has an own meta tag.
These are most likely populated in your files, @botez with Lastname, Firstname
So Plex only imports what’s in your files.
You may need to take a look at your files with a software which lets you see and edit these metatags.
Doh – just looked at the songs in Picard and I see that the fields for “Artist Sort Order” shows “Case, Neko” for this album. So, Plex is working as expected!! Sorry about that.
Good news! Being that it is an ID3 v2.4 tag, I was unaware that Plex paid any attention to that tag.
@beckfield said:
Good news! Being that it is an ID3 v2.4 tag, I was unaware that Plex paid any attention to that tag.
Support was added already a few months ago.
Of course, if you have files with contradicting tags in your library, all bets are off, which one gets used.
As far as I know, none of my TSOP tags are populated. I’ve got some work to do, I guess.
I guess, Plex will use this tag from the file where it notices it the first time.
Afterwards, the Artist is already in the database, so no freshly added or modified file will change that.
i.e. it will only affect your plex database if the artist in question was not in there before.
I’ve already got 'em manually set in Plex anyway, so that shouldn’t mean much. But if I ever need to start over from scratch, it will save me some work.
@beckfield said:
I’ve already got 'em manually set in Plex anyway, so that shouldn’t mean much. But if I ever need to start over from scratch, it will save me some work.
I guess so.
Just as an FYI – I had to remove all the metadata in the ARTISTS directory to ensure that when I added my library back in, it didn’t use the Sort Artist field that was initially set.
