Indeed. I am still quite amazed that there is not a widely used sortby field in the ID3 spec.FWIW, many other media solutions have similar weaknesses. As a classical music fan, I am particularly anxious to have composer tags.
Adding the composer field for me is not so much about the actual composer field but more having a further field which I don't use for anything else.Meanwhile, I have settled on the following compromise:
I have tagged pop music "Firstname Lastname", so "Phil Collins" is filed under "P", not under "C". My main reason for doing this is that most pre-tagged MP3s and most entries in CMDB are tagged this way. With nearly 30k tracks in my collection, anything else would be a tremendous amount of work.
The classical pieces are mostly tagged "Lastname, Firstname", so "Beethoven, Ludwig van" gets filed under "B".
I make exceptions only in the "Album Artist" (BAND) tag for albums by various composers, but a single performer, e.g., Anna Netrebko's "Russian Album".
I don't have much classical music so I tend to have the following
Artist Phil Collins
Album Artist Phil Collins
Composer Collins, Phil
I started off by using Tag & Rename to copy across the Album artist field to the composer field. I have then over time fixed things like this. (most album artist tags tend to be the ones I want to sort by anyway and it is only individual's names or bands starting with The which cause and issue (although MP sorts out The)) I just then create a view with something like
Selection Operator ViewAs SortBy
Composer Group Big Icons Composer
Album Artist Icons Composer
Album Filmstrip Date