What comes after "Z"?

[TimothyB]

I have ARTIST_SORT and ALBUM_SORT set up for all my collection.

The ALBUM_SORT fields are artist year album, e.g.:

"Marx Harpo 1957 Harpo In Hi-Fi and Harpo At Work"

I want my various artists albums to come at the end of the list. How can I do that?

(Actually I want various artists after "z" and then soundtracks after that.)

I tried starting the ALBUM_SORT with a tilde "~", since that comes after "z" in ASCII, but it seems like the server wants to sort all punctuation characters to the front.

I tried a forum search, but apparently "various" is too common to search for, and the "various artists" threads just confused me.

[JJZolx]

Yeah, the server does something odd with sort strings. For some unknown reason it strips all non-alphanumeric characters from the string. There's a bug on file for it:

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17577

So you can't push items to the top or bottom of the list using ___SORT fields with punctuation characters. But you can still us alphanumeric characters to do the same thing. Since the sort fields are never seen, it makes no difference.

For ALBUMSORT you might try prefixing a field and assigning numbers such as shown below. For it to work, It's important to add this to the ALBUMSORT field of every album in the library.

0 - non-VA, non-soundtrack
1 - VA
2 - soundtrack

0 Marx Harpo 1957 Harpo In Hi-Fi and Harpo At Work

This should work for browsing by album. If that album is a soundtrack by a single artist, then you'll have to decide where you want it sorted in the list.

[TimothyB]

Thanks for the reply - I was afraid that would be the case.

The problem with adding 0 in front of normal albums is that when I go to "Home > Albums" in the web interface, everything will be under "0 1 2" in the bar just below "Home > Albums".

I guess that for now I can add "ZZZZ01 " or somesuch in front of the VA albums. That will hide VA and sound tracks under "Z", but I can still use the rest of the alphabet.

The other place - and thinking about it, this is more important to me - I want to affect the sorting is when I view an artist. So if I browse to say "Michael Hedges", then this will put all the compilations he appears on after the normal albums.

Thanks again - I just voted for Bug 17577.

--- T