Advice needed on mapping sort tags

[JulianL]

I keep FLAC files for my Squeezebox and use dMC to create a shadow folder structure with AAC files for iTunes (to sync to my iPhone). To keep Squeezebox Server happy I need to add the tags "artistsort" and "albumsort" (no spaces) but iTunes doesn't understand those so I want to use dMC's tag mapping to put the correct iTunes tags into my converted AAC files.

Just looking at artist sorting then, if I tag the FLAC files with "Artist Sort" and use dMC to convert to AAC then I get the correct sorting behaviour when I import the AAC files into iTunes and if I look at the tags in the AAC files with dMC it tells me that there is a tag called "Artist Sort" in the AAC file but if I look at the same file using the "View / Extended Tags..." action with MP3Tag then it shows me a tag called ARTISTSORTORDER (and also ALBUMSORTORDER for the album sorting) and there is no "Artist Sort" (or "Album Sort") tag in the AAC file.

So my question is, when I set up my tag mappings for dMC conversion (by adding a couple of "Add DSP Effects / ID Tag Processing / Map" actions via the conversion options), do I set the targets as "Artist Sort" and "Album Sort", do I set them as "ARTISTSORTORDER" and "ALBUMSORTORDER", or will either one work? If either way will work then which way would you use?

- Julian

[Spoon]

Re: Advice needed on mapping sort tags

The sort tags in m4a are defined as atoms, so dBpoweramp might show "artist sort" whilst another program shows ARTISTSORTORDER, but that does not mean the the value ARTISTSORTORDER is in the tag.

[JulianL]

Re: Advice needed on mapping sort tags

Thanks Spoon. I found a section of the help for MP3Tag that made it pretty clear that ARTISTSORTORDER was just the text symbol that it was using to map the actual m4a tag value into meaningful display text for the UI. I set the targets in the dMC convertion rules that I added to "Artist Sort" and "Album Sort" and the tags all came out perfectly in the AAC files and iTunes sorts it exactly as I was expecting. I also set my dMC convertion to take the single Folder.jpg file that I use for my FLAC originals and embed the artwork into each individual AAC file for iTunes to see it and that works perfectly too so dMC has done absolutely everything that I need to automatically take my FLAC files that have been tagged and organised specifically for Squeezebox Server and do all the conversions to automatically generate perfectly tagged AAC/iTunes files with no more interaction required on my part. What a great piece of software.

- Julian