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[rsg]

Is there a way to tell MC to ignore punctuation at the beginning of an album title? I am thinking of albums like Phil Collins' ...But Seriously or Pet Metheny's :Rarum IX. The reason for this is that the beginning punctuation changes where the album is placed in the library...it doesn't go in alphabetical order, but according to the punctuation symbol (i.e. at the top of the list)

[blgentry]

I would recommend doing this yourself with two new fields:

[Album Sort (auto)]
[Album Sort]

[Album Sort (auto)] would then be the field that you sort your albums by.  Just change your Albums view to use that.  Next, for any exceptions albums like the one you just listed, put a value into [Album Sort] that removes the leading characters, or otherwise alters it so that it sorts as you expect.

Now the magic:  Make [Album Sort (auto)] a calculated field that takes the value of [Album Sort], but only if it has a value in it.  If [Album Sort] is empty, the [Album Sort (auto)] takes the value of [Album].

So most everything sorts just like it sorts now.  You control the exceptions with [Album Sort].  This powerful idea is simply an extension of the concept of [Album Artist] and [Album Artist (auto)].

If you're wondering about the calculated field [Album Sort (auto)], it would look something like this:

FirstNotEmpty([Album Sort], [Album])

Brian.

[aviateur]

RSG, Hi:

Here's an additional way to accomplish what you want. Make no mistake, I like Brian's suggestion. This is just another way.

I have several of the album types you described. So here is my suggestion. Establish a custom field. I called the one for this test [AlbumTrimmed].  Build an expression in the 'Calculated data' area to trim or strip away the special characters at the beginning of the string [Album]. I then changed the test view to sort by the custom field [AlbumTrimmed]. This view gives me the choice to sort by [Album] or [AlbumTrimmed] with a left-click of either column header. I've provided images. Also, as I import new albums, the trimming will automatically occur based on the list of special characters established in the 'Calculated data' expression. I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Lawrence

[AndrewFG]

You could also try adding those punctuation marks to MCs list of "articles to ignore".

Normally this is used for excluding prefixes like The, A, El, Los, Der, Die, Das, Le, La, Les, from sorting, but I also use it for example for the title Sir, and I think it might work for ... or : as well. Try it.

[rsg]

You could also try adding those punctuation marks to MCs list of "articles to ignore".

Normally this is used for excluding prefixes like The, A, El, Los, Der, Die, Das, Le, La, Les, from sorting, but I also use it for example for the title Sir, and I think it might work for ... or : as well. Try it.

This worked...almost perfectly. This nice and simple solution worked for albums such as (What's the Story) Morning Glory and :Rarum IX. Couldn't make it work with David Bowies "Heroes" or the Beatles "Yesterday"...and Today, so I eliminated the quotation marks (in Tagging) and then MC sent the album to the right place in the library (alpha listing). Thanks!