How can I have foobar2000 sort by ALAC’s ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER?, Was: ALAC <ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER> (TOS #6: What about it?) Options

[PC_ALACer]

Yes I know ALL CAPS is like SHOUTING, so I apologize and digress ...

Short story: My media library is encoded in ALAC (long story), despite owning Windows 7 PCs. I have gone through the painstaking process of properly editing the metadata (in iTunes), such that Bob Dylan is alphabetized as "D" rather than "B." Unfortunately, fb2k does not recognize this field (it shows up in the comments as <ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER>). Does anyone have a workaround to properly display my music in fb2k. Re-editing the metadata is not appealing.

Thanks.

[Kohlrabi]

If I understand correctly you have a metadata field titled "<ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER>" when you open the Properties->Metadata of a respective track? You can then easily sort by using %ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER% or $meta(ALBUMARTISTSORTORDER) instead of either %artist% or %album artist%. I'd suggest replacing occurrences of either %artist% or %albumartist% with $if2(%albumartistsortorder%,%artist%) or $if2(%albumartistsortorder%,%album artist%), respectively. Do note that %album artist% will fall back to the ARTIST metadata field if ALBUM ARTIST is not set, too. Based on this you can create new custom sort orders for the Album List Viewer or the Playlist Columns.

Hope this helped.