How artist tags are ordered/displayed

[FLACtastic]

Hi

This is only a tiny feature idea, but it would be very nice to have, IMO. My old Sony Walkman used to have it, and I miss it!

It would be great (for me at least!) if the player could disregard the "The" in artist tags - so "The Beatles" would come under "B", "The Doors" under "D" etc.

So looking at the database, under 'Artist' you would see something like:
AC/DC
Beatles, The
Crowded House
Doors, The

I just think this would be a little more intuitive - for example, no one thinks of The Beatles' name as beginning with "T" - your first instinct is to look under "B"!!!

Of course, the obvious workaround is just to re-tag your files.  But it would still be nice to not have to do that.

[JdGordon]

Not this again... firstly you are wrong... I know for a fact that the beatles start with a T...

the only corect way to do this is using the sort tag in the id3 info for the file (and only in the database). I'm not sure what the status is but there is a patch to do this (it may even have ben commited already.)

[AlexP]

Please search, this has come up hundreds of times.  A few objections - what about other languages?  What about "Die"?  In German it means "The" and therefore should be ignored for sorting, but in English it shouldn't be ignored.  Ignoring "The" only is a half-baked solution that only works in one language.

As JdGordon says, the sort tag is the correct way to do this.

[Vague Rant]

There's always the folder view; nobody's stopping anyone from having their Beatles folder be named "Beatles, The".

[FLACtastic]

Never mind, I've re-tagged all my files. I have no idea what anyone means by "sort tag" or what "patch" is needed.  I thought you could choose your language of preference, so didn't think language (The, Die, Le, etc) was an issue.

I also thought there was an international ban on renaming folders, but Vague Rant has very kindly cleared that one up for me.
Thanks.  No, really.   Thank you, very much.


Edited to remove a needless swear.

[Llorean]

While you can choose your language of preference, you can't choose the language in which the band is named for every individual band.

As soon as you have a mixed collection (or even cases where some bands are explicitly named "The Noun" while others are named "Nouns" but commonly prefixed with "The" so that you might wish sorting to be different) the solution of just having a list of an article or two that are ignored doesn't work reliably.

At the moment, sorting is 100% consistent - songs end up where they are based on what you named them. The ideal solution is still 100% consistent - their position in their list is based on their sort tag. Trying to do it any other way will result in additional complications based on language or simply aesthetics.

The advantage of sort tags extends further, of course. Some band names feature multiple spellings over the years, or other strange things, and they allow a user to choose to have them all sorted in the same place despite that, etc.

[Vague Rant]

I thought you could choose your language of preference, so didn't think language (The, Die, Le, etc) was an issue.

You can't choose the language of the names of the artists you listen to, though. Die Allianz ("The Alliance") should ideally be sorted as "Allianz, Die" just as the Beatles would be sorted as "Beatles, The". But Die Laughing, a name in English, would be sorted as "Die Laughing". Regardless of what language you set Rockbox to use, those names have mutually exclusive sort patterns; it just can't be automated without one of them being sorted incorrectly--Die Allianz as "Die Allianz" or Die Laughing as "Laughing, Die".

Sort tags are just special tags which are read by players to implement intelligent sorting. They're written the same way as any other tags, but with sort tags you can have your Beatles songs tagged as "The Beatles" but sort tagged as "Beatles, The" which, on a player written to do so, will give you your preferred sorting, without having to modify outward-facing values (the stuff you see while playing your music).

A patch has been made to read these sort tags when using the database, which simply means that somebody or somebodies have developed this functionality but it has not been committed into the Rockbox source; to use it you need to check out Rockbox from SVN, apply the patch (assuming that it is synced with the current source), and compile it yourself.

EDIT: Damn it Llorean, way to say everything I just said 12 minutes before me.

[wintermute23]

How would the band "The The" be sorted?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_The

[Vague Rant]

Personally I have them sorted as "The, The", on the assumption that the first "The" is the definite article, and the second "The" is a noun; specifically, the noun meaning "the word the". That's always been how I've interpreted the name, though I don't have any evidence to suggest whether Matt Johnson feels the same.

[trgz]

I know it's an old thread but I've just been listening (on iTunes) to 'Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band', also known as 'The Bonzo Dog Band' and 'Bonzo Dog Band'* (if album covers are to be believed) and think that, as much as I hate to admit it, Apple get it right with their ability to ignore the word 'The' in all cases, though I did notice that, in my iTunes library ,'Die Krupps' are in fact under 'D' ; also I can think of a few more bands who dropped/added a prefix ('The Pink Floyd' became, well I think you know who). Point is, that unless you start messing up the Artist's name then I can't quite see how RockBox is going to handle this in the Database/Artist list. It's a problem that I came across when programatically building playlists so I added a method/function to strip the word 'The' before building the playlist name - perhaps this might be an approach for one of these patches I keep hearing about? perhaps the language issue might be addressed in order to surpass (again) the original firmware too.

and as a footnote, I did consider if I'd like to see a system file a group called '10cc', 2 Many DJs' or 'The 45s' under 'T', 'T',or 'F', respectively, but I'm not too sure that'd be a good idea.

* and even a '(The?) Bonzo Dog Dada Band' but with no releases if I recall