Issue description:
I have 5 artists that are not sorted according to their albumartistsort or artistsort tag. I assume I have a tagging issue, but can’t find it. All of the files are .opus files. All of the artists are single individuals with a first name and last name. I’ve made sure artist, albumartist, artistsort and albumartistsort are all correct and consistent. None of these files have any MusicBrainz tags. What else should I check? Thanks!
Logs:
Upload description: username: Zestfully / problem: artist sorting
Additional information:
The artists with the problem are: Andrew Hill, Brian Eno, George Harrison, Lou Reed, and Pete Townshend. They show up sorted by their first name when viewing by Album Artists or Artists.
Reproduction steps:
There are no particular steps to reproduce. The artists with the problem are never sorted properly. I did a sync with the logs on (without having added any new files) because I wasn’t sure what else to do for the logs.
Media provider:
Local device
Screenshots:
You need to really check all the tags, for example with the default delimiters :
2025-07-08 19:48:43.263 Verbose TagParserWorker [709] Tags: CachedAudioMetadata(file='content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/tree/C498-4554%3AMusic/document/C498-4554%3AMusic%2FBudd%2C%20Harold%2F1980-04%20Ambient%202-%20The%20Plateaux%20of%20Mirror%20%5B2004%5D%2F02%20-%20Steal%20Away.opus', displayName='02 - Steal Away.opus', dateAdded=1750282124000, tags={ALARS=[Budd, Harold], AR=[Harold Budd / Brian Eno], ALAR=[Harold Budd], ARS=[Budd, Harold, Eno, Brian], TRA=[2], RDT=[2004-10-05], TY=[1980-04], ALS=[1980-04], AL=[Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror], LAB=[Virgin], ODT=[1980-04], TIT=[Steal Away]}, properties=CachedAudioProperties(duration=89813, bitrate=200, sampleRate=48000, bitsPerSample=0, channelCount=2, hasImage=false, format=OPUS), parent=content://com.android.externalstorage.documents/tree/C498-4554%3AMusic/document/C498-4554%3AMusic%2FBudd%2C%20Harold%2F1980-04%20Ambient%202-%20The%20Plateaux%20of%20Mirror%20%5B2004%5D/children, cueFile=null, lyrics=null, library=null, externalCover=null)
This one will have a Brian Eno artist without a sort title.
With that said, there’s probably more cases when I can merge also the sort titles, will see what I can do.
Thanks so much! As you said, the Harold Budd / Brian Eno album was missing the sort tag for Eno. I didn’t think to look under Harold Budd’s albums for a Brian Eno problem.
For all the other artists, the issue was that their names appeared in the Composer tag of unrelated albums that had cover songs. Adding ComposerSort tags to those other albums fixed the artist sorting. I had never manually added any composer tags, so I assume they came from ripping software getting them from MusicBrainz or freedb.
I used Foobar2000 to search for those artist names because I had no idea where the artists may have been used in composer tags. You may want to consider a settings option that ignores mixing the composer tag into artist/albumartist sorting. I love it now that I understand it, but I can see it being very frustrating for someone who has no idea there are composer tags.
Your app is amazing! Thanks again.