Ignoring "the" and "a" when sorting artists

[JimZipCode]

I think this is something that has been solved over and over.  There used to be a patch for this, back when I first installed Rockbox to my iAudio X5L, 3+ years ago.

How do I get my Artists to display, alphabetized but ignoring a leading "The" or "A"?  So all my "The" bands are not grouped between Talk Talk and Ultravox; and "A Flock of Seagulls" appears between Erasure and Gary Numan, rather than between Abba and Bach?

Thanks,

jim

[AlexP]

If using the filebrowser: name the folder as you wish to sort.

If using the database: I'm not sure if the sort tag is supported yet, if it isn't then as a workaround you could use albumartist.

Something that just ignores A and The is unlikely to be committed as it is hardcoded to English only.  Using a list of words is difficult - e.g. "Die" is both an English word and one form of the German definite article.  Depending on the nationality of the band you might want to sometimes ignore Die and sometimes not.  The sort tag for the database is the way to do this.

[JimZipCode]

Something that just ignores A and The is unlikely to be committed as it is hardcoded to English only.  Using a list of words is difficult - e.g. "Die" is both an English word and one form of the German definite article.

Yeah, I saw a reference to some of the complications, in some notes on a rejected patch.

But it's frustrating, as I had a patch back when I first was using Rockbox with my X5L, 3+ yrs ago.   English only, of course, but it fit my needs.

The sort tag for the database is the way to do this.

Can you give a little more detail on that?

Post Merge: February 08, 2011, 08:35:17 AMI should not have used the word "patch", I should have said that I thought there was some easy way to do this, like a simple edit to tagnavi.custom or something.  I used to have this working...

[AlexP]

The sort tag for the database is the way to do this.

Can you give a little more detail on that?

Much as you have a tag for title, a tag for artist, etc. etc. there exist tags for title sort, artist sort etc., so for e.g. The Beatles you would have artist as "The Beatles" and artist sort as "Beatles, The".  For ID3v2.4 it is TSOP I believe (http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames).

I'm not sure if the Rockbox database supports these tags, I don't use it.

[torne]

No, we don't support it in the DB yet.

[mlt]

I would also add '...' to the list as I know one band name that starts with ellipsis :-)

[JimZipCode]

Is this relevant?

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/2885

[evilnick]

I would also add '...' to the list as I know one band name that starts with ellipsis :-)

...And you will know that band, how? 

[mlt]

Is this relevant?

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/2885

That patch is quite outdated. In spite of IRC resolution, there is a demand for this feature. Sometimes it is easier to enable single feature rather then cleaning entire collection. Can we reopen this task or shall I create a new task? I have a patch against recent svn that implements skip of 'a' and any dots besides 'the'. It doesn't rely on strncasecmp() and alike, thus filtration should be fast in a single pass. I need to test it a bit though.

I would also add '...' to the list as I know one band name that starts with ellipsis :-)

...And you will know that band, how? 

"And" :-)

[Llorean]

You shouldn't re-open a task for a rejected feature.

[JimZipCode]

In spite of IRC resolution, there is a demand for this feature. Sometimes it is easier to enable single feature rather then cleaning entire collection.

As you say, there is demand for it.

However, a couple weeks later, I'd like to acknowledge that I now appreciate how fully the AlbumArtist tag (and the Mp3tag program) address the issue.  It was laborious to go thru all the songs and re-tag them, and initially it was annoying.  But you sort by Artist and you can do whole swathes of files at the same time; and honestly it was exactly the kind of fiddling around with files to get everything exactly right, that someone who's going to choose Rockbox will enjoy doing anyway.  It was a pain in the ass, but not TOO bad a pain in the ass.

I only had 16-20Gb of music to tag, and most of it was whole albums (or mixes).  I can see it would be a much bigger PITA for larger collections.  So, as you say, there is demand.  But I'm good, now.

[Llorean]

I think one point that's missed is that every new feature makes Rockbox slightly bigger, and contain slightly more stuff that can accidentally get broken later when adding other new features.

This stuff adds up, and can have a detrimental effect going forward in both how hard it is to improve Rockbox further, and in how much RAM the Rockbox binary occupies.

It's beneficial to have one solution that can meet everyone's needs, rather than several different tools that solve the same problem, sometimes in lesser ways. "Ignoring 'The'" is one of these 'lesser ways' that can only really meet a very limited subset of needs. If every single "well you could also just have an option to do this that met my case, even if it doesn't work for everyone" solution went in, Rockbox would probably already have about half again as many options as it has, and probably feel even more overwhelming to new people.