Music app Composer sorting really acting weird

I think I may be asking for something that the Music app won't do. I would like to enter "Prince" into the "Sort as" field to group together all my Prince albums where he uses different monikers (Prince, Prince & the Revolution, Madhouse (side jazz project)). If I do this, the albums view show the actual name used on the album, as seen on the left side of the screenshot picture below. But then if I look at the Artist view, there's some weirdness much like what I saw with the composer issue I had, where "Prince" shows up multiple times. I guess I didn't notice this before, as it's not as obvious as what I saw with the Burt Bacharach composer issue.

If I enter "Prince in the "Album artist" field, the Artist listing now behaves, with just one listing for "Prince", but then the album view shows "Prince" as the artist for all of these albums instead of the different monikers. You can see this on the right side of the screenshot picture below.

To my mind, the Artist view should organize by the "Album Artist Sort as" field, then "Album Artist", then "Artist Sort as", then "Artist", and the Artist list should group items by the first non-zero entry in the order above. This would result in one entry for "Prince", as if I had entered "Prince" in the Album Artist field for all of these albums, but retain the display of the actual moniker used for the albums in the Album view, as that seems to pull from the Artist field.

Likewise, the Composer view should organize by "Composer Sort as", then "Composer", and the list generated in that view should be grouped by the first non-zero entry. With this, all the Burt Bacharach partnerships would be pulled together under "Bacharach, Burt" as one entry.

This seems more intuitive to me than whatever the Music app is doing.

I've done the "add x to the album name and then delete it" thing myself. But just because iTunes/Music doesn't seem to work well if different primary values have the same sort value, that doesn't mean that the sorting algorithm in iTunes/Music can't be improved.

It's been a long time since I've done any coding, but here's one approach I can think of to address the original issue I mentioned about the Burt Bacharach composer list weirdness. The routine would parse "Sort Composer", and if "Sort Composer" is a blank value, then parse "Composer", and generate a list of composers. Then scan that list, and get rid of duplicates. Then group the songs under the generated list of composers, and under each generated composer entry, group the songs by artist then album.

Thanks, that helped. I was surprised that I was having such an issue with this, as I had done a similar thing with Artists who have a number of side projects. For example, Prince has Prince, Prince and the Revolution, New Power Generation, and other groups/monikers. I had that set up in my library as all "Sort as — Prince", and there weren't any obvious weirdness that resulted.

Having said that, it does seem like grouping all those Burt Bacharach composer combinations under the same "Sort Composer" heading should not cause the listing weirdness that I saw. Maybe that's just me.

It sounds like you're confirming my take on the way Music handles the Sort as field — it's not going to do what I would like it to do.

Keeping with the Prince example, for artist sorting, if multiple monikers are grouped together under a single entry ("Prince") in the "Sort as" field, I'd like the Album view to look like the left side of the photo above, where the moniker is displayed, not "Prince" for all albums. For the Artist view, I'd like the monikers to appear where "Prince" would appear on the list, but not to have the weirdness that I see with duplications, as seen in the screenshot below. In other words, this section of the Artist list should have one entry each for "Prince", "Prince and the Revolution", "Prince and the New Power Generation", "The New Power Generation", "The NPG Orchestra", "Prince & 3RDEYEGIRL", and "Madhouse", and all of these should show up where "Prince" would be on the list as if it was by itself.

I would also expect the Composer sorting to behave the same way.