Database alpha ignore.

[PaperArtillery]

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about duplicating most media players' and iPod's system for ignoring the article "the" when alphabetizing the database, particularly by artist names.  I would experiment, but as my programming experience is extremely limited and I don't understand the actual internals of rockbox, I figured I should ask first.

What I'd like a sample to look like is this:

Bad Religion
The Beatles
Counting Crows
The Decembrists
E Nomine

and so on, instead of:

Bad Religion
Counting Crows
E Nomine
The Beatles
The Decembrists

[MarcGuay]

There are lots of these in the tracker:

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/2413

[pixelma]

Another topic that always comes back...

There are several threads in the forums about it, just search for "ignore the" and you'll get a lot of hits and lots to read. The idea of just ignoring "the" has been rejected because it only works with English and adding other languages' articles isn't very handy too - who decides which language will be added to such a list, who would actually add the code... and what will happen when a word is an article in one language and has a completely different meaning in another language (often cited example, the German article "die").

It was agreed on that the better solution is to make the database support the "sorting" tags and then a user could let the displayed artists/albums etc. be sorted by these tags but let it display the usual artist names etc. Someone already started working on that and posted the work to the tracker (tracker task #7287).

[danny_pav]

why couldn't the list of articles be a file so that you can have a different list of articles for each language pack?

[bascule]

Well it could, almost anything is possible. The point is whether or not it would be accepted into the standard code and the dev's consensus opinion at the moment is that the 'correct' way to do it is to support the standard sorting tags and no other way.

[AlexP]

why couldn't the list of articles be a file so that you can have a different list of articles for each language pack?

What happens if I have songs in a mix of languages, and sometimes I want 'Die" to mean "die" as in English, and sometimes I want it to mean "The" in German?

[bluebrother]

(often cited example, the German article "die").

Just as an explanation how a "language pack" would fail:
Imagine someone having the artists "Die Ärzte" (a german band, where the "Die" is an article) and "Die Happy". If you language-like treat "Die" as article you'll get a sorting based on "Ärzte, Die" (which is correct) and "Happy, Die" (which is wrong). Simply put, it isn't as simple as ignoring an article or even making that article configurable. The only proper solution is to implement sort tags in the files metadata.

[danny_pav]

using sort tags is problematic in that:
1. for every tag we would want to sort by, we need to have an alternate sorting tag.  so tag artist, would need sort_artist, album would need sort_album, etc.
2. are there any ripper/organizer/library software that supports these tags -- if not, how do we tag our music sets to wrok properly?  is the sort going to completely blow up when i don't have the new tags on some part of my collection?

[markun]

Sorting should be done on the the normal tags if the file doesn't have a sort tag. So just add it where needed.

No idea which tag editors support it.

Here you can see some sorting tags for various formats:

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardQt/TagMapping

[soap]

using sort tags is problematic in that:
1. for every tag we would want to sort by, we need to have an alternate sorting tag.  so tag artist, would need sort_artist, album would need sort_album, etc.
2. are there any ripper/organizer/library software that supports these tags -- if not, how do we tag our music sets to wrok properly?  is the sort going to completely blow up when i don't have the new tags on some part of my collection?

1 - The easiest way to start would be to do a bulk tag-write and copy artist to sort_artist and album to sort_album.  Then you can customize the sort tags at your leisure, and the failure result would be to sort albums as usual.
2 - Musicbrainz and Foobar should both support these tags - and that is the only two tagging programs I am familiar with.  As I said - there will be no blow-up - only failure-to-status quo.

[danny_pav]

so if the tag is not present, it will use the original?  so then this feature could be added and no one will be forced to retag their library?  that's good

and then if you wanted to take advantage of this, there are (at least) 2 apps which can do the tagging?  that's good, too.

so, has this been officially entered as an issue?  is there a tracking #?

thx - dan

[bascule]

so, has this been officially entered as an issue?  is there a tracking #?

errr... see pixelma's post above, she links to the only actual attempt to do this. AFAIK, the rest of the 'track sorting' tasks in the tracker are just feature requests

[SinthrillMeadear]

another simple way to have rockbox overlook "the", is to remove them. i kinda figured that out one day, that if a word isn't there, the database can't sort it. 

[yapper]

Instead of deleting 'The' it could be moved, e.g. 'Beatles, The'.

Or come to terms with the fact that the band decided to name themselves 'The xxx', and therefore they really do have a name beginning with 'T'

[Llorean]

That's my personal position on it. You always gotta scroll to somewhere, and I actually think it looks worse seeing a whole bunch of Bs intermixed with occasional Ts on the left side of the screen when a so called "smart" sorting algorithm is in place.

But the sort tags, when they're finished, will allow for a solution that's pretty darn flexible too. And fixes more problems than just ignoring "The" anyway.