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[ventilatedslacks]

I came over to Media Center from Helium and there's one feature in Helium that I can't seem to find a match for in Media Center. Is there a way to create an Artist Sort field, so that the Artist name is The Rolling Stones,, but when you list artists, you can sort by Rolling Stones, The. Otherwise, I end up with quite a few bands all huddled together since they all begin with "The".

This application rocks like nobody's business  

[gkerber]

Good idea, somebody has mentioned it before.

There could be a list of words that are ignored when found at the start of a sort, for artist.  Album title and track title could be special sorted too.

"The "
"A "

What other anchored strings?

[Deivit]

Don't know if this may help you, but what I do is using the "Album Artist" for a similar purpose. It's great how many different applications you may find to the Album Artist field, and sorting order can also be one of them.

I have many jazz albums that I want to be grouped by the main performer of the ensemble but without losing the name of the ensemble itself. For instance, you may have albums by:

- John Coltrane
- John Coltrane And Paul Quinichette
- John Coltrane With The Red Garland Trio
- John Coltrane, Bobby Jaspar, Idrees Sulieman, Webster Young, Mal Waldron, Red Garland, Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, And Arthur Taylor
- John Coltrane, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, Idrees Sulieman
- The John Coltrane Trio
- John Coltrane, Bobby Jaspar, Idrees Sulieman and Webster Young.
and a large etc.

I set the "artist" file with the actual name of the performers but the "Album Artist" field to "John Coltrane".

Then, I have different view schemes... one is named "All Artists" where the "artist" field is the one used. Another view scheme (my main view scheme) uses the "Album Artist" field instead of the "Artist" field, and therefore all the above bunch of albums appear under "John Coltrane".

I understand that you may do the same for sorting pourposes. Just select all your "The Rolling Stones" tracks, go to properties, library tools, copy & move fields and copy the "Artist" to "Album Artist" (leaving the original field untouched)... once copied, delete "The" and you'll have all those tracks with Album Artist set to "Rolling Stones".

Just a thought...

[gkerber]

Interesting idea, I'll look into it, that might solve more than one thing with one solution.

However it does not really address the issue for Album titles and Song titles.

Special sorting like this is not a hard programming issue, but it then takes keeping a list (maybe set by the user?) and documenting it to avoid confusion.

I wrote a program many years ago (and still use) to read a dBase .dbf file directly (which is now maintained using Access) and displays music the way I want to see it.  It's an old DOS program now, but I did implement special sorting as we are talking about.  In the sort comparision function (for qsort), I checked for special leading strings (like "the ") and if there, moved the pointer for that string to just past the special leading string and then did my string comparision.  Presto, sorting and ignoring special leading strings.

[Deivit]

Special sorting like this is not a hard programming issue, but it then takes keeping a list (maybe set by the user?) and documenting it to avoid confusion.

There's also the problem with foreign languages. For instance, in spanish the word "a" starting a sentence cannot be deleted without changing the meaning of the sentence. Therefore, if you have english and spanish tittled songs you cannot set a rule to delete every "a" at the beginning of a song name or an artist name... and the same would occur with other words and/or languages.

[gkerber]

There may not be a perfect solution for everyone, but if the list of anchored strings to ignore for sorting were configurable, then each user could choose what, if any compromises to make, or none at all by leaving the list blank.

So picture this, in OPTIONS. there could be a screen where a list of anchored strings to ignore for sorting purposes, and the choice to use the list for Artist, Album and/or Track name.  Users would just make their choices and the sorting routines would honor them.

This is fun, being a customer and making suggestions to the developers, and giving (uninformed) opinions on how "easy" it all is.....  I'm used to being on the developer side.