I am trying to (finally) tidy up all the media attributes in my database... I have never been able to use the Title/Performer/Genre sort mode effectively because the results were always inconsistent. I presumed that was because the attributes were a bit of a mess (which they are) and it is a big job to sort them all out.
But i have noticed some unexpected (to me) behaviour. Sometimes, for instance, performers do not appear in the Performer sort mode which definitely exist in the database. After a bit of experimentation, it seems that if the performer attribute is set against the directory only (ie the media file itself does not have the attribute) then the performer will not appear. As soon as you add the same attribute to the media file, the performer appears.
Fine I thought, I'll set the attribute on both. But then in Genre mode, if the genre is set on both directory and file, then both appear in a sort, whereas performer only appears once (against the file) even if set against both file and directory.
So it seems that I need to set the cover art against both files and directories, but performers only against the files. Genre's can be either or both it seems. Is this everybody else's experience? How do you resolve this - I really don't want to have a complex set of rules as to which I need to set which attributes against. Seems to me that this could be a complexity caused by the select queries the Orbiter uses - is this perhaps something that could be made more consistent in the Orbiter code so that the results of sorts are more consistent? I haven't checked filters or searches closely yet...
