I have noticed Audirvana (for Windows) sorts Artists by the second word in the Artists name despite the file tags. For example, for Alice Cooper albums, I have the file tags Artist (ARTIST), Artist Sort (ARTISTSORT), Album Artist (ALBUMARTIST), Album Artist Sort (ALBUMARTISTSORT) all populated as “Alice Cooper” and yet Audirvana files them under “Cooper, Alice”.
Audirvana should (but doesn’t) first look at the “Artist Sort” (ARTISTSORT) file tag for sorting Artist and the “Album Artist Sort” (ALBUMARTISTSORT) file tag for sorting Album Artist. If the “Artist Sort” field and the “Album Artist Sort” field are blank, then Audirvana should sort based on what is in the Artist (ARTIST) and Album Artist (ALBUMARTIST) file tags.
Audirvana works that way since the beginning (2011 more or less) …
… if you find that SortArtist is wrong it’s easy to change the value all over your db without the need to find every album.
Just search for the Artist, in the search result panel click on the Artist, then open the metadata editing area on the right, only Artist Name and “sort as” will be shown, change the value for “sort as”.
This will change the “sort as” value for the Artist all over your db.
Thanks. It is “easy” but it is monotonous – I have to do this for many artists. I shouldn’t have to go through this cumbersome exercise to correct the sorting order.
It is possible that Audirvana copies the Artist Sort tag (ARTISTSORT in Vorbis Comments and TSOP in ID3) and populates the “sort as” field in the Audirvana database the first time it encounters a new artist. However, thereafter, Audirvana ignores the ARTISTSORT file tag.
It would be a lot simpler if Audirvana read the actual file tags (beyond just the first time) to determine sort behavior.