'The' in artist names

[rbziggy]

Is it possible to get xL, when it's building the music database, to ignore 'The' at the start of artist names so that, for example The Beatles are listed under 'B' and not 'T'.

(I don't want to edit the id3 tags to 'Beatles - The' or similar!)

Both iTunes and Windows media player do this and its been noticed by the family - we have a hugh bunch of artists beginning with T at the moment!

(If it's not, I wonder if others would be interested in this as a future feature request. Say as a 'ignore The when loading database' tickbox?)

Thanks

[Colby]

Dont edit your id3tag, edit your xl database. For the few bands which will be the, change the display, or artist name or whatever, and sort accordingly. I sort by artist b4 display, my display is "the beatles", where artist is "Beatles".

[rbziggy]

Thanks

I'll take a look at this (can't remember which way I sort the music db!).

[m_ski]

I do this by having a new field called 'artistsort' automatically imported using metamasks from the name of the directory that the albums are stored in. So all of my Beatles albums would be in a directory called 'Beatles, The'. I then sort using the 'artistsort' field and none of the display categories are affected at all.

This way I only have to edit 1 name for each band/artist and if I have to re-import the database I don't have to edit it at all.

[joeb]

I do this by having a new field called 'artistsort' automatically imported using metamasks from the name of the directory that the albums are stored in. So all of my Beatles albums would be in a directory called 'Beatles, The'. I then sort using the 'artistsort' field and none of the display categories are affected at all.

This way I only have to edit 1 name for each band/artist and if I have to re-import the database I don't have to edit it at all.

Could you post your metamask?

[m_ski]

The metamask I use is;

Code: Select all

\\(?<genre>.*)\\(?<artistsort>.*)\\.*?\\

I also load in the Genre from the directory structure so I can easily sort all my music into a fairly limited set of abour 5 or 6 Genre's. My files are in a directory structure like this...

Code: Select all

Genre \ Artist Name (to be used for sorting ONLY) \ Album \ MP3 files

You can then sort the database using...

Code: Select all

artistsort:albumname:tracknumber:trackfilename