D'oh. I forgot about CSN&Y.

CSN&Y put paid to another idea I had: magic handling of "&" in artist names, so "Kids" by "Robbie Williams & Kylie Minogue" would be matched by searches for both "ROB..." and "KYL..."

That turned out to be difficult

Peter

Soup views deal with articles properly (i.e The Doors gets sorted under D). Or at least, the Artists soup view does;

Sorry, not in the version of emplode (v2.00-beta11) that I am using it doesn't. Perhaps when the next public beta comes out ... ?

DOW! That would have been very cool! It's kinda a little annoying that anywhere you have 2 artists who have co-operated on a piece to shows up as being a completely new artist in the soup view rather than just being attributed to both of them. Would be a pretty hard one to handle though without having multiple artist fields.

Would be a pretty hard one to handle though without having multiple artist fields.

Yes. ID3v2, of course, allows multiple artist fields. But non-first-normal-form databases are icky. Allegedly. They're certainly harder to make efficient in a car-player-style situation than 1NF databases.

Peter

Soup views deal with articles properly

Sorry, not in the version of emplode...

Ah, I really meant soup views on soupy players (namely, the HSX-109). Emplode is different; its soup views are set up to match the search screen on the player, as that's the only places on the player you can see a list of artists. And yes, although the artist searching is article-aware, the window's actual ordering isn't.

Peter

That turned out to be difficult

Difficult? Isn't that just another word for a nice programming challenge?

Come on... Flex those geek muscles.. It's a great idea and I'd love to see it happen (along with my comma suggestion.)

So then would you write CSN&Y as: "Crosby & Stills & Nash & Young" ?

Since my mp3 collection predates the empeg, I've long since removed "the" from all artist names. My primary reason was to make mp3s easier to find by typing the name in Windows explorer (don't have to type "the " first). It also helped reduce my confusion about bands like The Bangles... or is it just "Bangles"? Without "The ", I don't have to worry about it.

Since I've already removed all "the "s, they're that way on my empeg too and I've grown to like it that way over the last several years.

Umm, shouldn't that be just "Amigo?"

I'm not sure about the Bangles... I can tell you that "Eurythmics" is just "Eurythmics" though. And "The The" is definitely "The The" - would you try just "The?" Ugh...

Bruno

I was okay with just removing the articles until I got to ``Who''. That one broke my brain and I had to redo everything.

There is, in fact, a separate ID3v2 tag for "string to sort under in artist lists" (and others for title and album). But the player doesn't use it; keeping every artist string in memory twice would be too much overhead.

Could you keep an index (list of indexes for multiple artists) into the original artist string and parse that out as strings to search under. The artist string would be kept in memory only once, but split across multple "artists". That way multplie artists (such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) could be found under Crosby, under Stills, under Nash, under Young and under CSN&Y. Only problem would be when you wanted exclusively Neil Young songs, no CSN&Y -- a problem indeed.

But this gets to what I'm really interested in -- multiple artist attribution. I've got many songs (remixes, etc) that would be attributed to the orignial artist and the remixer (Peter knows who I have in mind) that I'd love to find under searches, especially when they're scatter all over different albums. Of course, thats thinking probably way beyond even post-2.0 stuff. But I can dream, can't I?

-sml

If I ever have any of my own music (which I serious doubt will ever happen), yes, I'd file it under "Amigo" without a "The" in front.

I don't have any music by "The The", but if I did, yes, I'd file it under "The". It's so much easier that way in the Windows explorer view... just type the first few letters and it scrolls there.

He, 'Rock'n'roll Nigger' attack ('Easter, I believe)!

I really think this multiple artist attribution would be worth the effort (together with the proposed sorting hack). It applies to covers, collaborations, renditions of jazz and folk 'standards', 'tribute' type albums, performers like The Swingle Singers (speaking of 'The') or Boston Pops, the whole lot of things.

BTW, how about using semicolon instead of comma in the sort hack; works around comma in atrist name problem, and still looks half decent if accidentally displayed?

So, what do we have to do to make you (edit: you meaning Peter) change your mind about attacking this problem?

Edit: Oops, I meant this to be reply to Peter. Never mind...

So, what do we have to do to make you (edit: you meaning Peter) change your mind about attacking this problem?

You have to demonstrate that it affects two of my favourite albums.

Oh. Darn.

Peter

Hmm I thought I would really not like the semicolon but it doesn't look all that bad. My brain is used to Lastname, Firstname but Lastname; Firstname isn't that much of a stretch. The C programmer in me says that the semicolon is the end of a line and reverses the string with very little thought.

So it seems the concensus is that two semi-distinct features are being asked for. The first is for user-specified artist sorting using some kind of reserved character, and the second is multiple artist fields per track as ID3v2 allows. The combination of those two features would seem to solve most if not all of the problems mentioned so far in this thread, it seems

Can't wait to see how things progress.

And now what would it take for you to stuff both those albums into a box and post them to me? Damn. I can already smell the prices I'll have to pay for "Import" titles at a local HMV (Canada). Ugh.

Bruno

Damn. I can already smell the prices I'll have to pay for "Import" titles at a local HMV (Canada).

Auntie Aubrey goes for US$20 on Amazon US (or you could pay US$40 for an import version with exactly the same track list). It's £20 from Amazon UK, so that sounds like a deal to me.

Amazon US have a remarkable deal on imports of Stone Roses The Remixes: "List Price $26.99 Our Price $26.99" (sic) but the US$47 you'd pay for both albums is still only about the same as the £32 they'd cost from Amazon UK.

I guess you'd have to pay more to get them exported to Canada though (unless there's an amazon.ca I don't know about).

Peter

Just to chime in...I'd REALLY like this too...
but I'd have to hope for something other then a comma...
"Stills, Nash & Young, Crosy, "??? Yeah right...then it'd be all wrong again with it sorted under Stills instead on Crosby...

How about this :

You enter your artists as you should :
The Rolling Stones
The Doors
The Police

Then in another field in emplode you put a number, for demonstration purposes we'll use the number 5.
In the above examples, R, D and P are the 5th characters in the artist name.
So the sorting will start there instead of the default 1 in that field to allow sorting from the first character.
This would also allow you to enter the number 6 so Dave Matthews Band can appear in the M's
Or a 7 so Billy Joel appears in the J's

I don't know how this might be implemented,
but maybe someone can take my idea a little further...

anyone ?

What I did was to make sure the ID3 tag has "the" in it...but the folder name for the band does not. That way the folders sort the way I want and the tracks still show up in my empeg display with "The". Some bands just don't sound right without "the". The Who, for example. Lots.