Composers, Artists and Sorting

[MDE]

Just trying to understand how the various sorting methods works. For composers, it seems like it is necessary to enter additional composers in the "composer roster" in Options in order to sort by last name. The new items seem to take effect after restarting Muso. How/where is this data stored? I have on occasion needed to clear the Muso database and am concerned that this will erase any "custom" composers I add.
For artists, the LMS import uses the custom tag (is that ArtistSort or "Artist Sort"?) and this can be further customised. However, I don't see how I can retain the customised version as re-importing over-writes it. I can of course try and fix all the wrong tags.
I guess what I am expecting is to be able to have some control over the artists and composer databases independently of the music files and database, so this post may be partly a clarification request and partly a feature request.
Also, I am trying to understand what happens if I use an artist name such as "Angela Hewitt (Piano)". For some reason, she doesn't get listed in the hierarchy along with plain "Angela Hewitt", or indeed at all, as she just appears as a supporting artist despite being the named artist on every track in an album.

[musoware]

I can confirm if you Clear your Database that means your Track database, and the Album/Artist/SimilarArtist cache that it derives from the track database. Things like the Specialised classical info, configured tags, custom tag configuration, cached artwork etc are stored separately so these won't be cleared.

You can ensure a composer is sorted correctly EITHER by registering him in the composer roster OR by registering him the Sorting tab under Options (which an import from LMS feeds, from the ArtistSort/ComposerSort tags presumably).

[MDE]

Can I assume that the Composer Roster is not cleared if I clear the music database?

[musoware]

Can I assume that the Composer Roster is not cleared if I clear the music database?

Yes that comes under the category of "Specialised classical info" in my post above.

[RichG]

Yes that comes under the category of "Specialised classical info" in my post above.

Is this the situation with track Group Header tags as well?

[musoware]

Yes that comes under the category of "Specialised classical info" in my post above.

Is this the situation with track Group Header tags as well?

Um no, that's part of the track database. So if you have added these in Muso's database then clear it, you'll lose these. If you imported them from custom tags it doesn't matter though, it can re-import them.
Why do you want to clear the track database?

[RichG]

Why do you want to clear the track database?

Fortunately I don't - but I had wondered what would happen if I did after spending an age getting the headers in place on all my classical albums.

In the past I would sometimes clear the database if I had made any major changes to my library, like moving many albums around in the folder structure, to avoid having to deal with duplicated / mis-placed entries in Muso, but now find it better to deal with them in the Muso database page.

[musoware]

Why do you want to clear the track database?

Fortunately I don't - but I had wondered what would happen if I did after spending an age getting the headers in place on all my classical albums.

In the past I would sometimes clear the database if I had made any major changes to my library, like moving many albums around in the folder structure, to avoid having to deal with duplicated / mis-placed entries in Muso, but now find it better to deal with them in the Muso database page.

There's always a way, I never clear my Muso database since I've invested too much time in getting things like the Group Headers right in Muso. If Muso had been able to import these from the start from custom tags, I will probably have made the decision to set them there instead. New users have the choice.

Incidentally, if you move a whole album folder but keep the folder name the same in its new location, muso should recognise this and just change its internal references without ending up with duplicates.

[MDE]

Oh dear, now I seem to have lost all my artist sorting. I cleared the list because I wanted to make a clean start, then imported from LMS, but now it's importing nothing into the sort list. Anyway, I'm trying to move off using the LMS scan as an intermediate stage, so it really would be better if the sort tags could be imported in the custom tags section.
Sorry, this thread seems to have become a bug / feature request now.

[musoware]

So (1) it's not importing sort keys from LMS - EDIT: I just fixed this in 1.5.20.
and (2) You want an enhancement to feed the sorting from custom tags. Please start a new thread on the enhancements section for that one - it needs some discussion. I think maybe it should feed the sorting detail as standard from tags as LMS does. What I don't know for sure is what LMS does when it reads several different artistsort entries for the same artist (like Muso, LMS seems to have one list of sort keys in a table that it builds from the individual track tags "ARTISTSORT" etc).