setting ignore.sort in the All Artists tag?

[pete_w]

(23-01-2023 17:48)simoncn Wrote:  As you have discovered, the All Artists index shows all Artist tags in your library. To change the sort order for these Artist tags, you need to set Artist.ignore.sort={The}. This also changes the sort order for Artist tags shown in the Artist index. For AbumArtist tags that are shown in the Artist index or the AlbumArtist index, the equivalent setting is AlbumArtist.ignore.sort={The}.

The Artist index works as it does because many users want to see an index of "main artists." For large classical or jazz libraries, many tracks could have multiple Artist tags for "supporting artists" and putting all these artist names in the Artist index would create a very large list of minor artists that would make the index harder to navigate. Tagging an album like this with an AlbumArtist tag for the main artist excludes supporting artists for that album from the Artist index. To include supporting artists for the album in the Artist index, the AlbumArtist tag can be omitted.

Thanks, Simon. So if I re-order the Artist and AlbumArtist tag lists to ignore the The, then that automagically ripples through to the All Artists list without further interventon. Cool. Thank you.

And thanks for explaining the use case for the AlbumArtists being subtracted from the Artists. Makes sense when you explain it like that. For me, I'm not (yet, perhaps!) a sufficient jazz geek to have that problem. My problem is the simpler one of having 30 years worth of compilation albums ("Now....", Chilled Ibiza, the usual things that one picks up from charity shops for the one good track for a party) and I don't want those hundreds of one-off artists to clutter up my main list, but I do want them to be there to be found if ever I really want to. And by sticking "Various Artists" in the AlbumArtists field of those albums, I have unintentionally removed them all from the Artists list, which is where I was expecting to find all the artists.

BTW, how do I stick (and index) multiple Artists on one track if I want to? Apologies for naivety but a lot of this tagging is new to me, I'm newly arrived from the world of directory hierarchies....