Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion
Rejection of "ignore the" patch (split from the Evil_G unsupported build thread)
safetydan:
If you want it to be automatic there are plenty of tools out there that will automatically populate your music files with the correct metadata. Heck, if someone was motivated enough they could write a plugin for Rockbox to go through all your music and copy track details to the sort tags while ignoring articles.
So if people still want something similar to the "ignore the" patch, perhaps they should work on making a plugin to do what I described above. That way we can have things the "right" way in the core, and the "wrong" way is isolated in a plugin.
Llorean:
And just to clarify, if it's not clear from above, what that would mean is that if you simply run that plugin, after you've run it, no other user steps, Rockbox would then act like it had the "Ignore The" patch for the database (or ignore articles based on whatever list of articles the plugin had) without any further user intervention (assuming the TSOP support was also implemented by that point). And a plugin like that could surely get accepted into SVN, meaning you wouldn't have to have the hassle of using an unsupported build and depending on someone else for your updates or maintaining the patch.
hotwire:
The problem as it appears in the English language, to me at least is as follows: usage of the definite article 'the' in artist/performer titles is ambiguous at best.
In examples such as 'The Beatles', 'The Who', 'The Music', clarity of artist identity is lost on deletion of, or rearrangement of the definite article, but alphabetizing of the a list of these alongside other items lacking a preceding definite article almost always results in a sorting that ignores said definite articles. This is why for many English speaking Rockbox users, the necessity of an "ignore 'the'" patch is essential for his or her Rockbox experience. The only examples I can think of offhand of a sorting that does not ignore 'the' are Rockbox, and the Windows file systems. In fact isn't the official name for the artists above invoke the definite article, and thus any rename results in an inaccurate tag?
As for that ambiguous example: The Arcade Fire... or is it Arcade Fire? Last.fm states the former, and the English Wikipedia states the latter, although going back a short number of revisions "The Arcade Fire" is used by Wikipedia also. Their album covers use the latter, and yet all mentions of them in common speech (the same common speech that uses 'their' in place of 'his or her'), I only ever hear the band referred to as The Arcade Fire. I am absolutely certain with a little effort, someone on this forum could even find two albums by an artist by which the artist uses a definite article in their name for one album, and does not in another. Which one takes precedence? (this is intended more as a rhetorical question).
In the case of an album name or song title, usage of the definite article is not as ambiguous. Take "The Black Parade", or "The Rising": both of these are formal titles to which usage of the definite article is deliberate for titling and thus must not be ignored when performing an alphabetized sort. In other words, any 'ignore the' patch should only apply to artist/performer name and not to album or song title.
There you folks have it in a nutshell as to why in my opinion the requiring of users to perform a batch rename of tags to relocate any preceding definite article (henceforth referred to as "Artist, The") is in fact the inelegant shortcut for when a user wants to perform a sorting of artist names as is normally performed in English. If you disagree, feel free to attempt to reorder any list on Wikipedia so that artist names starting with "The" appear under T, and see how long you last before your edit get reverted by one of those 'Wikipedian grammar freaks': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_music_artists
I'm sure if someone has the will to dig around on Wikipedia for the policy on alphabetically sorting of lists we can find the proper procedure. I bet it may even link to the norms in other languages.
Llorean:
Something tells me you completely ignored the whole conversation and chimed in at the end.
BOTH solutions put "The Beatles" between "Beast" and "Beautiful" if applied properly. Both show "The Beatles" when reading the list.
But one doesn't mandate that it goes there, doesn't mandate that other songs starting with "The" have their The ignored (completely flexible), and allows for articles in any language to be handled on a case by case basis.
The other doesn't.
English speaking Rockbox users aren't the only Rockbox users. A solution should encompass everyone, or be able to, and it should not have side effects that prevent its use. "Ignore The" breaks both of these concepts, as if used for English songs it could at the same time break non-English songs. And if non-English articles are added, it could break songs where the same string of characters isn't an article.
hotwire:
Sorry, my train of thought was considering the sorting order of current rockbox builds.
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