Bugzilla – Bug 16416
Need better control over sorting mechanism
Last modified: 2010-07-30 18:35:59 UTC
Given the myriad of ways you can specify sorting, and the number of ways tags can be written and automatically inserted (e.g. by MusicIP and such), it is extremely difficult to understand the reason for an unexpected sorting result. The forum discussion at http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80558 is one example, and the number of sorting-related bugs in bugzilla adds evidence. After spending quite a few midnight hours inspecting and retagging my files (+50k), I am getting a bit frustrated ... it is a VERY tedious business to find the one file and the one tag that makes and artist sort the wrong way (from my perspective). I just found a bug whoch (hopefully) can reolve the last of my problems (https://bugs-archive.lyrion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9866), but the basic problem remains; it is very hard to understand (and fix) the reason for unexpected sorting. On top of the general confusion (at least for a beginner) around the ways you can specify sort order, and the way a single tag in a single file affect all entries, it appears that Squeezebox has a somewhat secret and non-deterministic way of resolving names and deriving sort order from available tags. Although the intention to make the best use of available metadata has its merits, it is also rather confusing if you have a large number of files with varying tagging styles (some have albumartist, some have artistsort, etc). Rather than trying to fix all these variations "at the source", it would be much simpler to have a server setting that defines what tags to use for sorting, and in what order. This way I could tell Squeezebox server to simply ignore the tags that I don't know the quality of. The default may still be to use the current mechanism (do the best of what's available), but I would really appreciate an option to state which tags to honor in order of precedence and presence (missing tags are ignored). Example: Artist sort order tags [artist, artistsort, almbumartist] Album sort order tags [] (default)
The sort fields are recognized as a means of _helping_ users sort fields by something other than their displayed value. Most people when tagging CDs that they rip will not use them. Similarly, music downloaded from legitimate commercial sources seldom use them. The tagging in both cases tends to be pretty vanilla.
(In reply to comment #1) > The sort fields are recognized as a means of _helping_ users sort fields by > something other than their displayed value. Most people when tagging CDs that > they rip will not use them. Similarly, music downloaded from legitimate > commercial sources seldom use them. The tagging in both cases tends to be > pretty vanilla. Yes, but there are a gazillion of tools to batch process files, and an equal amount of ways to set the tagging options. I have batch-retagged my files a number of times with different settings, as my opinion/understanding/requirements for tagging grows and changes over time. This may be a result of changing or updating a player that doesn't support the old tagging scheme, or that it supports a new, better scheme. Or that I think I've come up with a brilliant idea that will make things so much better. For instance, I once turned on the MusicIP plugin for SBS, and it messed up my entire music collection by destroying all multi-genre tags that I had carefully (and manually) set on all files - the MusicIP plug-in did not recognize multi-valued, null-separated tag values, and rewrote the tags with only the first genre (details are out of scope for this issue, but there are forum threads on this problem). I also messed up rather many files by turning on the "fetch metadata from the internet" option in Windows Media Player. I have also had mishaps by batch retagging my collection using a tagger with bad settings. I have also bought untagged downloads and used rippers to tag my own CDs without tags, and used MusicIP (or similar) to tag the files "after the fact". Using a bad setting while ripping and/or tagging with possibly multiple metadata sources can cause inconsistencies. As a result of all these possible mishaps, I now have a script that recursively traverse the entire music library and sets all files to read-only, to reduce the risk of repeating these accidents. All in all, there are a number of perfectly valid reasons for having messed up tags. Most of these errors are easily corrected since they are apparent on the player UI or a tagger, but the sorting problems are IMHO really hard to sort out (no pun intended), at least for a rookie.
(In reply to comment #2) As discussed on the forum thread mentioned above, here is a use case to consider: Use MusicIP/MusicBrainz/Picard to autotag your files (manually using the tool, or using the SBS plugin). This apparently adds XSOP tags stating the sort order for the artist, based on the MusicIP library (lastname, firstname). There is virtually no tool support for editing or removing XSOP tags. Having an option to tell SBS to ignore the XSOP tag when deciding on sort order would be really helpful. Now, another option to handle sorting problems was suggested on the forum: It would be nice to have some kind of debug option to have SBS report either all sorting tags it finds, or all sorting tags for a specific artist/album, or all contradiciting sorting tags it finds, or all of the above.