Tags in [Lastname, Firstname] format?

[jacobacci]

All my tags are written in [Lastname, Firstname] format. I use this format in Album Artist, Artist, Composer, Soloist etc. fields.
I have seen that Jaikoz uses [Lastname, Firstname] format in ArtistSort etc fields. Is there any way I can make Jaikoz use this format in Artist etc. fields?
Thanks a lot

[paultaylor]

My first question would always be why do you want to do this, because there are separate sort fields that allow you to sort by lastname, firstname but display in the more usual firstname lastname format.

But you can do this very easily as follows:

How do you copy value of Sort Artist into Artist field

The Artist field stores the artist name, the Sort Artist field stores the name in sort order. For people this means the artist field is in the form Firstname Lastname but the sort artist field uses the form Lastname, Firstname. Most music players should display the value in the Artist field, but use the value in the Sort Artist field to sort the values and similar logic applies to to other fields such as Album Artist or Composer But sometimes users want to store the sort value in the main value…

This will work for the following pairs

Artist/Sort Artist
Album Artist/Sort Album Artist
Composer/Sort Composer
Conductor/Sort Conductor
Producer/Sort Producer
Engineer/Sort Engineer
Choir/Sort Choir
Ensemble/Sort Ensemble
Performer Name/Sort Performer Name
Lyricist/Sort Lyricist
Mixer/Sort Mixer

[jacobacci]

Hi Paul
thanks, this resolves my issue.
Why am I using Lastname, Firstname? I started way back by storing my albums in a folder structure
Album Artist\Album\Disc#-Track#-Trackname
this allowed me to bulk extract a basic set of tags from the folder structure. This folder structure sorts in Windows explorer as I want and it allows me to quickly find albums in the file structure. If I wanted to rename an artist, I simply rename the folder and re-generate the tags (with i.e. mp3tag).
The world has evolved from there with sort fields. I could theoretically map my album artist folder names to Sort Artist, but then I need to find a way to generate the correct firstname lastname tags. So I’d rather just stick with one sort order and use the tags accordingly in a lastname, firstname format.
Call me lazy, but there’s a limit to complexity I can handle with 150k tags (of which around 15k are not listed in Musicbrainz). And yes, I know I can convert lastname, firstname to firstname lastname with jRiver by using RegEx. But this only works one way.
But your proposed solution sounds perfect

[paultaylor]

Here is a suggestion:

1. Sort the Sort Album Artist field so can see all the empty values at start then just select the empty rows and use the Append task the other way to populate Sort Album Artist from Album Artist where missing, i.e this should populate Sort Album Artist for all the tracks that have not been identified by Jaikoz and therefore should still have lastname, firstname in Album Artist field

2. Then you can modify your filename mask to use Sort Album Artist instead of Album Artist

The advantage if this approach is moving forward you no longer need to worry about it, it will be easier to read in your music player and also Jaikoz more likely to get goods matches if Album Artist stores the expected firstname lastname value rather than lastname, firstname value.

[jacobacci]

Thanks Paul, sounds like a plan, although quite a jump into the deep end.

I need to think about this for a bit, before I go down that route.

[tarkus]

Thank you very much - great idea

[paultaylor]

Of course you can try within Jaikoz and carefully check results before you actually save any changes.

[jacobacci]

Trying out individual operas is part of thinking about it

[jacobacci]

I made my first test tagging an opera with Jaikoz and then feeding it into my usual process. I could not see the ALBUM_ARTISTS_SORT tags in jRiver, after I defined the library field.
The issue turned out to be the different separator characters used by Jaikoz and jRiver
Jaikoz uses the null character: https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread.php?tid=74
jRiver uses semicolon
mp3tag uses \
The separator characters of jRiver and mp3tag can be read by the respective other program.
@paultaylor is there any way to make Jaikoz use something mp3tag and jRiver can handle?

[paultaylor]

What version of ID3 are you using ?

I think the solution would be to use ID3v24 because for that null is the specified character to use to split multiple values so I think would be understood by JRiver and Mp3tag.

Whereas for ID3v23 a separator is not universally defined so is a bit of a mess, we use null again but other applications do not.

[paultaylor]

Actually I think this is possibly a non issue, music applications use ALBUM_ARTIST_SORT not ALBUM_ARTISTS_SORT field, and the ALBUM_ARTIST_SORT field just stores multiple artists as a single value