Does anyone use the sorting name for artists, and how do you deal with multiple artist?
The decision to use artistsort depends mainly on the player, I think.
Only if the player can deal with that field is it worthwhile to think about a solution.
It makes sense for artists where it is not quite clear where to look for them:
Do you look for R.Kelly under "R" or under "Kelly"?
Or: The Beatles called themselves "The Beatles" or just "Beatles". ARTISTSORT could deal with it without loosing the original information.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young should stay the way the name suggests,
Earth, Wind & Fire should not become Wind, Fire, Earth & ...
In short: it is up to you.
I know how sorting works; I just wanted to know if there's some standard way to do it for multiple artists.
Your questions make sense.
I already had the same issue, but I think there is no standard, besides the well known of passing the articles to the end (like, "The Beatles" -> "Beatles, The"). I really dislike this method and I never use it in anything, because it's artificial and it may become extremely confusing at times.
So I always use the integral name of artist, album, movie, track or whatever.
I decided to put the AlbumSort to good use, so I created my own serial number for them.
This way I always have my albums ordered per artist, which is very helpful when browsing for long collections (Gandalf, Vangelis, Yanni, Enya, etc.)
In the case of the Artist Sort I haven't had any trouble yet in Instrumental and Pop Music.
But In classical music, this will be an issue, because I really want my favourite composers to appear first (e.g. Haydn, Mozart, Bach, etc).
So I'll do what I am already doing in AlbumSort (when I start organising my Classical discography).
I will do the same for the Artist Sort in Classical music, for the reason mentioned.
This is "my personal standard". 
Hopew this will help a bit.
And let me hear what you think of this and please make any suggestion to improve.
I actually meant the standard way of handling sorting names when you use multiple "artist" fields instead of "artist" = "Artist 1/Artist 2/Artist 3", because then you would also have multiple "artist sort" fields and the player has to connect the pairs somehow.
I don't really understand this.
I don't put more than one artist in the Artist Field. When I have more than one I only put the main artist in the Artist field, and all the others on the AlbumArtist field, which is why it exists.
Check these links:
https://docs.mp3tag.de/mapping
here you get the relation between the ofitial ID3 names and the tags used in Mp3Tag.
http://id3.org/id3v2.3.0
Here you can read this:
TPE1 (ARTIST)
The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character.
TPE2 (ALBUMARTIST)
The 'Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment' frame is used for additional information about the performers in the recording.
It means that the AlbumArtist field is the right place to put all other artists, and not the main lead artist. After all, leading (as in Lead Artist) is done by one person only (or a band), not by all performers, otherwise it wouldn't be a lead. 
As for the Serial number, it is simply a sequential and unique number as: 1, 2, 3, and so on, that uniquely identifies a field, in this case, an Album. Just that.
It is very useful to sort too, because it's a simple sort by only one field, whereas if you sort by year, for instance you might not get it right in cases when an artist has more than one album in the same year (unless you also add the month, which is what I do, but that takes another field.
Even so, you might get a double CD set, in which case you want the CD 1 to appear first, so again that ID may help.
That's how I use it.
But it's not critical if you don't use it. You will be able to handle your library anyway.
Yes, I use ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT on most albums. For multiple artists, it depends on several things:
- The way multiple values in a field are tagged.
- The tagging software.
- The player software.
If you're tagging with a system that expects multiple ARTIST tags, such a Flac's Vorbis comments, then you might have
ARTIST=Paul Smith
ARTIST=Nate Johnson
Technically speaking, these have no expected order, and could be written or read in any order. But Mp3tag does write them in order if you have 'Don Smith\\Nate Johnson' in a field value. Then it will depend on whether your player software always reads and associates them in the order written.
When tagging Flac files with multiple artists, I leave the ARTISTORT field out.
On the other hand, with a system that uses a separator for designating multiple values, I think it's safer to add an ARTISTSORT tag.
ARTIST=Paul Smith;Nate Johnson
ARTISTSORT=Smith, Paul;Johnson, Nate
This will always be written as-is by the tagger, and pretty much every player that recognizes both tags will use them in the correct order. However, you need to be sure about the player. Even though a piece of software may break up the ARTIST tag using the separator, it might not break up ARTISTSORT.
Wait. What? For me albums must always be tagged with
Album Artist(s)
Album Title
Year
If these 3 fileds do not match perfectly then you get "duplicate" albums
So...
Im assuming your player is parsing albums differently
The year is usually less relevant when it comes to isolating Albums with the same name. The Albumartist is definitely the other tag that will make a difference, as the combination of AlbumArtist+Album is what most programs use to separate them.
This is not the same as the original topic of this 10-year-old thread though. The sorting tags are used by some programs and apps to better browse. For example if Artist is "John Lennon" and Artistsort is "Lennon, John" you will find the correct name as John Lennon but in the library within the "L" section. This helps with exclusing articles like "A","An","The" and other things you wouldn't want to include in sorting. For those with multiple Artist tags you can also separate the equivalent sorting tag the same way.
Artist=The Beatles
Artist=John Lennon
Artistsort=Beatles
Artistsort=Lennon, John
To me that is a bit confusing as well.
If I were looking for John Lennon I'd look in J for John (personal preference)
In terms of removing articles like "The" "A" & special characters im with you. Ive just gotten a new player that supports sort tags & im happy i won't have to be hunting down a track artist or album only to realize its sorted differently because i forgot it starts with one of these articles or special characters
I also dont know how my player would handle multiple artist sort tags & multiple artist tags. Does it automatically match the first artist tagged with the first artist sort tagged?
My tracks currently have 1 tag for artist which has multiple delimiters (my very first player did not support multiple artist tags so my whole library was not tagged with multiple entries for artists. Ive debated if i should breakup the artist field into multiple fields but I like the extra info i can get from my artist fields as they are
Michael Jackson Ft. Rihanna & The Sylvers | Khoa
This tells me the main artist is MJ the featured artists are Rihanna & The Sylvers & this track was remixed by Khoa
If I tag these artist in a multivalue fashion
I'll just get several names with a comma that seperates each of them. Not to mention Some players do & do not support a "Remix Artist" Field
Now...in a case like this my artist sort field could be
Jackson,Michael; ...and so on but im unable to see how that helps me later as my artists page shows each of those artists by themselves
Michael Jackson
Rihanna
The Sylvers
Khoa
Am i meant to tag Multiple artist sort tags in the order by which thise artist appear in my artist field...or in alphabetical order perhaps
Ragarding album artists I dont believe putting all the other artists on this track besides MJ into the album artist field is the right call. Those artists maybe only appear on this specific track of the album & my album artist field needs to be an exact match across all the tracks on the album. So my album artist field could potentially have 20+ names to include all the folks who made appearances across the album. Even the composer tag doesnt do this (from files I've seen) there may be different composers per track so those composers stay attatched to just the tracks they are affiliated with
The players that I use search for any given word more or less in any tag field.
The bigger a collection grows, the more I have to rely on filters and the search function as scrolling through the whole list page by page would take hours, if not days.
So I wonder if a lot of effort should really be invested in filling these extra fields.
For me the sort tags are something I planned on creating an action for & then letting mp3tag do what it does best & handle my whole library with the switfness.
Currently I was making plans to use only the title sort tag.
Before now I was putting:
Ā²š
“ (Explicit) Ā¹š
² (Clean) ā°š
ø (Instrumental)
At the front of the artist field for many tracks. The superscripts are really just because the squared characters are acting as delimiters, as such they have to seperate two bits of info or they don't function.
But with title sort i can put š “ at the beginning of titles & then just always use my title sort tag to sort of ingnore those special characters & keep my library in the same alphabetical order its always been in.
But after looking at title sort my interest in the other sorting tags was peaked as they can be useful in some senarios like looking at a playlist, genre or already filtered list of files albums artist etc.
I just wondered how to use them properly or most efficiently. If they arent that useful to me then i wont bother ill stop at the title sort field & be happy i could tidy up my library a bit while still retaining my ghetto workaround for Explicit / clean tags in my player
All this would assume, I think, that the player actually shows the ~sort field(s) - otherwise all this information would be hidden and it would no be clear why some files are sorted in a different way than others.
And if you put the data into displayed fields then you would not need the ~sort fields.
Certainly this is a personal preference. For any of us that bought music in a legacy record store, you would have found him sorted under Lennon.
This depends on the player. Some don't do anything with mulitple Artist tags, some don't do anything with the sort tags. MusicBee for PC is very flexible for these. GoneMAD on Android does as well. Poweramp for Android will use the multiple Artist fields but not the sort fields. YMMV
This is how I manage my library. I have not tried changing the order of the sort field versus the standard one, but I would expect this would cause problems with players that build scan and build their own library from your tag info.
I agree, for your example only MJ should be in the AlbumArtist field.