Title sorting problem

[wordlover 103]

Why is Emby not sorting music albums correctly by Album Title? I have carefully proofed the names for a multi-disk set in MP3Tag, as shown below, but Emby is sorting them as 1, 2, 3, 6, 7... 25, 26, 4, 5. What's broken? How can this be fixed? These are all files that were just added to my music library. When I spotted the problem I reloaded, refreshed, and rescanned. Still the problem persists.

 

Edited February 14, 2023 by wordlover

[Luke 37095]

Hi, looks like you're sorting by title. Have you explored the other options in the sort menu?

[wordlover 103]

Yes, Title sorting is what seems broken. Other sorts seem fine, although because this is a big compilation of a lifetime of recordings I have no idea how Emby does or should sort by year, etc.

[Luke 37095]

11 minutes ago, wordlover said:

Yes, Title sorting is what seems broken. Other sorts seem fine, although because this is a big compilation of a lifetime of recordings I have no idea how Emby does or should sort by year, etc.

Why do you think Title sorting is broken? It is sorting by the title of the song. If you want to sort by Album, there is a sort order available for that.

[wordlover 103]

What we are looking at are individual albums, from a compilation set, each with an identical cover image. And if you look at the names/titles of those albums, as highlighted in red, the sorting is broken: Emby is sorting the disc titles as CD01, CD02, CD03, CD06... CD25, CD26, CD04, CD05. That is plainly incorrect. I sincerely don't understand your comment.

Edited February 14, 2023 by wordlover

[pwhodges 1532]

No, you have selected "Sort by Title" at the top of the Emby listing, so Emby is sorting by TITLE, the first column in your metadata listing, not by ALBUM, which is what starts with CD...

That said, I have not been able to get what I consider a usable "Album" layout in Emby for my extensive collection of classical music and private recordings, so I use folder view only, and arrange my folders accordingly.

Paul

[wordlover 103]

These are the only sortable fields, and "title" seems the only option, plus it works fine for every other set of albums by other artists. What other "title" than album name would Emby be using in a list of albums like this? How else would a user sort albums by their name?

[Luke 37095]

OK, the next release will have an album sort option. You may prefer that for this scenario.

[wordlover 103]

4 minutes ago, Luke said:

OK, the next release will have an album sort option. You may prefer that for this scenario.

Great, thanks - I'm still unclear on why choosing "title" option sorts albums the way it does (I looked at the whole 26 disc set again in MP3Tag, and sorting all tracks by "title" doesn't group albums in any discernible order at all, and definitely not the way Emby displays them), but glad there will be an official album sort soon.

[Happy2Play 8296]

Something here does not make since as my albums sort properly by title but do not have anything titled this way.

What view is this?

What does Emby show for sorttitle in metadata?

Edited February 14, 2023 by Happy2Play

[wordlover 103]

8 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Something here does not make since as my albums sort properly by title but do not have anything titled this way.

What view is this?

What does Emby show for sorttitle in metadata?

Right?! This makes no sense at all. Below I attach images from each click down, from the artist, to the album listing (which sorts wrongly), to one of the out-of-order-albums (CD04 and CD05) and one of the correctly sorted albums, where you can see the sorttitle for both is correct, but Emby still sorts incorrectly. Any idea on what's broken?

 

[Happy2Play 8296]

No sure but with it being specific to two albums it would have to be an isolated issue.  Have you removed those two albums, scanned, and readded?

Do they appear the same in folder view?

[wordlover 103]

Yes, all folders appear fine (and properly sorted, of course) in Folder View, and I have added, scanned, removed, re-scanned, re-added, and re-scanned all of these folders and files, and still get the same weird out-of-order sorting for CD04 and CD05. I even went in via MP3Tag again and manually retyped and resaved the album name on all of the files on those two discs. And as you can see above, Emby is reading the Title and Sort Title of each of those directories correctly.

(Is this related to the recently reported problem with sorting the files in a TV series? https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/111088-show-not-showing-in-correct-order/ )

So why isn't Emby sorting correctly?

 

[Luke 37095]

8 hours ago, wordlover said:

These are the only sortable fields, and "title" seems the only option, plus it works fine for every other set of albums by other artists. What other "title" than album name would Emby be using in a list of albums like this? How else would a user sort albums by their name?

This folder view is showing you tracks, right? So you'll want to look at the sort titles of the tracks, not the albums.

[Happy2Play 8296]

4 minutes ago, Luke said:

This folder view is showing you tracks, right? So you'll want to look at the sort titles of the tracks, not the albums.

The issue here is Artist-Album header to show all albums, to me this should have nothing to do with tracks.  Folder view and Album header from Artist should show the same sort order correct?  Assuming same sort option is selected.  I know my albums do assuming there isn't something different in SortTitle.

So this OP example should list all albums sequentially CD01 thru CD26.

[wordlover 103]

48 minutes ago, Luke said:

This folder view is showing you tracks, right? So you'll want to look at the sort titles of the tracks, not the albums.

When I look in Folder view (which sorts properly), and then drill down to look at the title of the first track of each of the albums/folders, there is no pattern at all that aligns with the incorrect album sorting.  Sort title of first track in albums/folders CD01 to CD0n goes from "bach" to "haydn" to "beethoven" to "brahms" to strauss" to "prokofiev" to "saint-saens" to "bloch" and so on, so it's clear Emby isn't picking sort title from the first track of each disc.

[Happy2Play 8296]

Okay I am seeing the wonky sorting in 4.7.11.0 but do not see it in beta 4.8.0.21.

Lots of work separating CDs out of Complete Releases.   All I did was apply Album name and strip discnumber/disctotal with no providerids.

Was good until it finished scanning.

beta

Normally Picard/MP3Tag (musicbrainz) would group all in one release and just show discs in that release.

But looking at them metadata DISCOGS changed the SortTile on the 19, 20, 23, 24 (25 appearred correct) on those items on stable server but did not get Discogs on beta server.

Easy fix to correct release was remove Discogs ids, and if still does not correct the issue copy Title to SortTitle.  I had CD25 that looked correct but did not sort correctly until I did this.

Retested CD25 by doing a Refresh and it appeared first with Discogsid and looking correct sorttitle, just copied Title to SortTitle correctly sorted.

Emby did not display this SortTitle that was written in nfo file in the parent folder.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<album>
  <review />
  <outline />
  <lockdata>false</lockdata>
  <dateadded>2023-02-14 17:56:16</dateadded>
  <title>CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos</title>
  <year>2017</year>
  <sorttitle>111 Years Of Deutsche Grammophon | The Collector's Edition</sorttitle>
  <runtime>61</runtime>
  <genre>Classical</genre>
  <studio>Deutsche Grammophon</studio>
  <uniqueid type="discogsrelease">2070889</uniqueid>
  <discogsreleaseid>2070889</discogsreleaseid>
  <artist>Martha Argerich</artist>
  <artist>National Symphony Orchestra Washington</artist>
  <artist>Mstislav Rostropovich</artist>
  <albumartist>Mstislav Rostropovich</albumartist>
</album>

@wordloverif you write nfo files you should be able to see this but may be hard to see if you have the same issue I mention below.

@Lukethere is a little chaos here with Artist/Album wrote to parent folder when they got rogue Discogs overriting each other.

	Line 1981: 2023-02-14 18:23:18.164 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2257: 2023-02-14 18:24:04.147 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD19 - Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann - Trios to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2395: 2023-02-14 18:26:12.003 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2454: 2023-02-14 18:27:34.491 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD19 - Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann - Trios to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2517: 2023-02-14 18:27:54.474 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD20 - Haydn, Trio n°16 ; Beethoven, Trio n°7 to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2533: 2023-02-14 18:28:08.715 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD23 - Saint-Saëns, Concerto n°1 ; Schumann, Concerto to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2637: 2023-02-14 18:28:22.935 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD24 - Early Recordings to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2719: 2023-02-14 18:32:46.939 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2784: 2023-02-14 18:33:05.363 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2892: 2023-02-14 18:35:44.992 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.

 

To me this all comes back to online provider creating a little chaos and sort of hard to see.  With a little rogue action on saving nfo. (Stable)

As mentioned I did not see an issue on Beta but don't see nfo being written at all.

 

Edited February 15, 2023 by Happy2Play

[wordlover 103]

Not sure I understand all this above, but I checked and can at least state that none of the albums nor tracks have any external provider metadata - not discogs, not musicbrainz. All those fields are empty on each of these album and track entries, if that adds any useful insights.

Edited February 15, 2023 by wordlover

[Happy2Play 8296]

7 minutes ago, wordlover said:

Not sure I understand all this above, but I checked and can at least state that none of the albums nor tracks have any external provider metadata - not discogs, not musicbrainz. All those fields are empty on each of these album and track entries, if that adds any useful insights.

But do you have them enabled on the library?  As Emby will always do a lookup of missing info per provider if not embedded in tracks.

But if you write nfo files it should/maybe easy to see in the nfo.  Otherwise copy and paste existing Title to SortTitle in the UI.

[Luke 37095]

45 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Okay I am seeing the wonky sorting in 4.7.11.0 but do not see it in beta 4.8.0.21.

Lots of work separating CDs out of Complete Releases.   All I did was apply Album name and strip discnumber/disctotal with no providerids.

Was good until it finished scanning.

 

Normally Picard/MP3Tag (musicbrainz) would group all in one release and just show discs in that release.

But looking at them metadata DISCOGS changed the SortTile on the 19, 20, 23, 24 (25 appearred correct) on those items on stable server but did not get Discogs on beta server.

Easy fix to correct release was remove Discogs ids, and if still does not correct the issue copy Title to SortTitle.  I had CD25 that looked correct but did not sort correctly until I did this.

Retested CD25 by doing a Refresh and it appeared first with Discogsid and looking correct sorttitle, just copied Title to SortTitle correctly sorted.

Emby did not display this SortTitle that was written in nfo file in the parent folder.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<album>
  <review />
  <outline />
  <lockdata>false</lockdata>
  <dateadded>2023-02-14 17:56:16</dateadded>
  <title>CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos</title>
  <year>2017</year>
  <sorttitle>111 Years Of Deutsche Grammophon | The Collector's Edition</sorttitle>
  <runtime>61</runtime>
  <genre>Classical</genre>
  <studio>Deutsche Grammophon</studio>
  <uniqueid type="discogsrelease">2070889</uniqueid>
  <discogsreleaseid>2070889</discogsreleaseid>
  <artist>Martha Argerich</artist>
  <artist>National Symphony Orchestra Washington</artist>
  <artist>Mstislav Rostropovich</artist>
  <albumartist>Mstislav Rostropovich</albumartist>
</album>

@wordloverif you write nfo files you should be able to see this but may be hard to see if you have the same issue I mention below.

@Lukethere is a little chaos here with Artist/Album wrote to parent folder when they got rogue Discogs overriting each other.

	Line 1981: 2023-02-14 18:23:18.164 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2257: 2023-02-14 18:24:04.147 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD19 - Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann - Trios to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2395: 2023-02-14 18:26:12.003 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2454: 2023-02-14 18:27:34.491 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD19 - Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann - Trios to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2517: 2023-02-14 18:27:54.474 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD20 - Haydn, Trio n°16 ; Beethoven, Trio n°7 to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2533: 2023-02-14 18:28:08.715 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD23 - Saint-Saëns, Concerto n°1 ; Schumann, Concerto to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2637: 2023-02-14 18:28:22.935 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD24 - Early Recordings to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2719: 2023-02-14 18:32:46.939 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2784: 2023-02-14 18:33:05.363 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.
	Line 2892: 2023-02-14 18:35:44.992 Debug App: Saving nfo metadata for CD25 - Schumann, Chopin - Concertos to C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Mstislav Rostropovich\album.nfo.

 

To me this all comes back to online provider creating a little chaos and sort of hard to see.  With a little rogue action on saving nfo. (Stable)

As mentioned I did not see an issue on Beta but don't see nfo being writtne at all.

 

So it's all good on the beta? What do you mean by this?

Quote

there is a little chaos here with Artist/Album wrote to parent folder when they got rogue Discogs overriting each other.

 

[Luke 37095]

OK I think I see what you mean. You've got multiple albums stored in a single folder, right? That's not going to work with nfo files for the reason happy2play stated. There's only one nfo file that goes into the folder, and it can only hold information for a single album at a time.

You will either need to re-organize your folder structure, or disable nfo support and remove existing album nfo files.

And we will need to update the help text underneath the option to specify this.

[wordlover 103]

Each album is in its own uniquely named folder:

[Happy2Play 8296]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

OK I think I see what you mean. You've got multiple albums stored in a single folder, right? That's not going to work with nfo files for the reason happy2play stated.

You will either need to re-organize your folder structure, or disable nfo support and remove existing album no files.

And we will need to update the help text underneath the option to specify this.

So it something with the CDxx naming trying to link up a folder level for Album?

as here has Artist/Album/CDs 

vs Artist/CDs

But in the end the primary issue I saw was mismatch not shown in UI of Title/SortTitle on 1 and change in SortTitle on the other 4.

 

[Luke 37095]

2 minutes ago, wordlover said:

Each album is in its own uniquely named folder:

Right, but those 26 cd's are meant to be one single album. You've got them organized that way, but not tagged that way. That's leading to 26 different albums each using the same album.nfo file, which is going to cause all sorts of problems.

[Happy2Play 8296]

2 minutes ago, wordlover said:

Each album is in its own uniquely named folder:

What is in that album.nfo as Emby sort of sees all cds as The Complete Recording and will save nfos wrong.