There are some changes to how the Artist field is sorted in CATraxx v7.20. Note that if you are satisfied with how artists were sorted in previous versions, you do not have to do anything special.

Manually exclude artists from sort order

First of all, it is now possible to manually exclude artists from the artist sort order. For example, suppose you have a track with two separate artists, like this:

In previous versions, the track would be sorted on both Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and as a result the track was listed after the other Neil Young tracks:

To tell CATraxx that you want to exclude an artist from the sort order, simply type a star character (*) in the artist role column in the Artist field, like this:

As you can see, "My Heat" is now listed among the other Neil Young tracks:

Note that the star character does not affect how the Artist field is displayed in the browse list, in reports, or in the explorer:

Exclude artist roles from sort order

In previous versions, artists linked to an artist role (eg. feat. or with) were included in the sort order when you sorted your albums/tracks by the Artist field. Here is an example from version 7.10:

As you can see, Speed King is listed after the other Ian Gillan tracks since Speed King is sorted on both Ian Gillan and Joe Satriani. When we exclude artists linked to an artist role from the sort order, we get this result:

As you can see, Speed King is now sorted among the other Ian Gillan tracks.

Note: This is the default behaviour when you create a new database, but if you are upgrading from a previous version of CATraxx, the way artists are sorted is not changed.

If you want to exclude artists linked to an artist role from the sort order, you need to edit the Artist Role table (right-click the Artist Role column in the Artist field and choose Edit Table from the popup menu), and check the "Exclude from Sort Order" box for all roles in the table. After you have done that, choose Tools->Database Maintenance->Update ArtistSort to update the sort order of albums and tracks already in the database.