Informal survey here... Who here uses the word "The" in their artist names? Like, I know the Empeg is intelligent enough to skip it in searches, but it still shows up way down the list in a fuzzy match... Like, if I search for "Doors" when my artist fields contain "The Doors", it's not right after Don Henley and before Doug E. Fresh, it's instead at the end of the list. I consider this a bit of a bug. Furthermore, artist playlists with the "The" included will be alphabetized with the T's instead of being in the right place.

So the solution would be to use "Doors", "Beatles", "Who" instead of their "The" counterparts. The problem is that looks strange because the name of the band really does include "The". So it's a bit of a predicament... Better alphabetization or more accurate band names.

How do you all handle this? To "the" or not to "the"?

My two roomates usually do "Beatles, The". I tend to do it the proper way though since the playlist menus can be sorted properly and search ignores it. They mainly had it the other away around from using other players before getting their empegs. With emplode 2.0, it's quick to change back around as well, since we archive our music with the the at the end.

I thought Emplode did this too (I could have sworn someone said it did), but jEmplode sorts "The Doors" as "Doors, The") so it would appear between B and E.

Mike

I go through and remove all the The's from the artist title, unless it's required as in the band, "The The". Also, I make sure to use the real band names vs. the "US" names (Charlatans vs. Charlatans UK, Suede vs. The London Suede and Verve vs. THE Verve).

later,
ajay

I thought Emplode did this too (I could have sworn someone said it did),

I'm not sure about Emplode's sorting.. I guess I just never tried it. RIght now I have the "The" removed, but when I see a song by "Who" or "Beatles" come up on my player, it just doesn't look right without it. I'm thinking I'll put the "The" in and see how it goes.

I've got the "the"s in there for "correctness" (must have been living in Germany too long! ), but it can be a little annoying in the soup views in emplode as the "the"s get shoved away down with the other t names.

Damn. That's what I was afraid of...

FWIW, I have banished all of the the. I don't miss those pesky buggers. Some obscure lobe in my diminishing brain has done a fantastic job of helping me not have a seizure when "Clash" floats across the screen instead of "The Clash". Plus, for scrolling-type displays, I think it makes the information content richer and more immediate. Who wants to watch a bunch of "The" fly by??

Jim

Hmm. I wish I knew what lobe of the brain that is, because it just doesn't compute when I see it. I agree "The" doesn't add much information, but it *is* part of the bands' names and I guess I just want the artist field to actually show what the band's name is... I'm a little disappointed that Emplode doesn't account for "the" in its sorting algorithm.

but it *is* part of the bands' names....

Yeah, I went to nuns' school, too!

I think I'm loosening up (or is that losening up?), though, as I age. I've taken a number of other liberties with some of my MP3s -- like renaming and retitling all my Patti Smith into Dionne Warwick tunes for a little surprise when my older sister comes to visit...

Jim

I've never had a problem with the way the player handles "The", and I leave it in the band names all the time.

In reply to:

---

I thought Emplode did this too (I could have sworn someone said it did), but jEmplode sorts "The Doors" as "Doors, The") so it would appear between B and E.

---

I said that the player's search-results screen sorts in that order; perhaps that's what you're thinking of?

I've never had a problem with the way the player handles "The"

My tongue-in-cheek comments aside, this is actually something that I agonized over a bit and where I wasn't 100 percent satisfied with the outcome. I couldn't cope with the idea of using a "Clash, The" syntax -- somehow takes the fun out of things for me -- makes me feel like I'm in a library. Whether to keep/drop "The" may also come down to how I interact with the player. I don't think I have *ever* used the remote in-car to search for a name. Using Playlists-->Artists-->, I just wasn't happy with having lots of artists bunch up under "T" when my brain wanted to find the Clash under "C".

In the end I think it's a matter of whatever floats your boat. Remembering a recent thread about capitalization (and maybe about how we have a responsibility to the artist to respect upper/lower case) I will say that I don't feel any such responsibility, regardless of what the nuns taught me!

Anyhow, one thing I really like about MP3 TagStudio is how easy it is to change my mind (I may change my mind on "The" yet again!) and recursively change the artist name for multiple albums. For grins, I just put "remind me never to play piano for them!" in the comment field of every Dead track. Simple.

Jim

Ah yes. That's it

What interface does MP3 TagStudio have for patterned changes to tags? Is it a regular expression you can run on different tags?

Mike

I've never had a problem with the way the player handles "The", and I leave it in the band names all the time.

Well then, let's review. Here are the capabilities and limitations as I understand them. Correct me if I'm wrong. Assuming the use of "The" in artists...

1. The player correctly finds them in a fuzzy search. If I type in "Doors" it works okay.
1a. However, artist which actually begin with D, E, and F appear first when scrolling down, *then* The Doors appears sorted as a "T" instead of a "D".
2. According to what people have said (I haven't tried this yet) playlists and tracks in Emplode are sorted in the T's instead of their proper place. This is not intuitive. Any artists with "The" would have to be manually (alt-dragged) into their proper place in the alphabet, and resorting the playlist would scew this up.
3. Also, according to what I've read here, artists in soup views are sorted with the T's. So, if soup views were implemented on the player, I'd have to go to the T's to get to all of my "The X" artists. Not intuitive.

Make sense? See why this is a bit limiting and counter-intuitive?

I agree, but the solution is hard, and I'm not sure that there's one that's totally correct. To bring up just one possiblility, what if you had the artist ``L'Ame Des Poetes'' on your empeg. This ought to be under the As (unless the French alphabetize using articles, which I doubt). But what if you also had an audio book by ``L'Amour, Louis''? That should be under the Ls. Which also brings up the question of how to alphabetize the names of people. It should be alphabetized by last name, but there's no way for the player to distinguish ``Pink Floyd'' from ``Earl Scruggs'', unless you wanted to list him as ``Scruggs, Earl'', which I don't like, and that doesn't even touch on the fact that ``Gabriel Garcia Marquez'' should be alphabetized under the Gs (for ``Garcia'').

Now, the best idea is probably what you suggest, that it ignore a leading ``The'', as well as ``A'', and maybe ``L''', ``Das'', etc. But nothing is going to be perfect, obviously, and that's why I've already resigned myself to not use the soup lists. I'll just keep creating playlists for everything I want to listen to, and organize them myself. But fixing this problem would tend to speed things up a little.

I always go for the first "real" word in the title myself. For me it's just "Beatles" for example. There was way too much under the T section, and it took to long to scroll there. Besides, I've organized my CD's that way for over 10 years so I'm used to it.

I've also broken down my "various artists" into categories too, that folder was getting a little overwhelming. Now it's "Soundtracks", "Compilations", etc.

I've never had a problem sorting or finding anything this way.

What interface does MP3 TagStudio have for patterned changes to tags? Is it a regular expression you can run on different tags?

If I take your meaning correctly, I'd say the answer is no. It will recurse through subdirectories, but the substitution is complete -- overwrites whatever else is in the field. No regular expression facility that I can see, but it does have some other built-in geegaws for reformatting file names, titles, that may do what you are looking for.

Jim

All my artist fields (original ID3 and player database) contain "The" where appropriate. My PLAYLISTS however, use "The" after the unique part of the name ("Beatles, The")

This distinction in playlists isn't necessary with 2.0 software, but it's a left-over from the way I have my folders named on my backup drive (the OS doesn't have the fancy sorting abilities made easy by the player database).

Regardless of how Soup views get implemented on the player, I will not be changing the Artist fields to remove leading "The" or "A" - when information is presented in Track view, I want to see it as I would read it on the CD (or album or whatever).

One of the better suggestions (though costly in memory) was to allow using an alternate (new) field for sorting. This would take care of any special cases such as names. I just hope that Soup views will handle the basics like "The" and "A" - I'll just have to get by with a first-last linear alphabetical on artist names.

Bruno

You beat me to my suggestion on the alternate artist field which would be used for sorting. I used a CD catalog program called Catraxx which did this. It was smart enough to auto suggest when you used definite articles "The" for english speakers, but it also supported the appropriate ones in other languages.

Brainstorm alert!!!

Actually I think it could be done even simpler and without the extra field. Check this out.... When you enter your artists, you could enter them with a comma. They could be stored with the comma in the ID3 field (and subsequently in the player's FID files and database) to indicate that the player should sort them as such, but when displayed on the player (in track listings, soup views, etc) they could be *displayed* with the "The" in front of them. And for those who want to do their solo artists alphabetically by last name (something I hadn't even thought of until Bitt mentioned it) this would work also. Obviously, Pink Floyd would just be stored as plain ol' Pink Floyd.

So, the player, when it's displaying them (but not when it's sorting them) could just be instructed to do what our brains do already with names listed as such... Find the comma, read until the end of the string, and then read the rest of the string from the beginning to the comma. Like so:

char * pszComma = strchr(pszArtist, ',' );



if ( pszComma != NULL ) {

   write_string_to_screen ( pszComma +1 );

   pszComma = NULL;

   write_string_to_screen ( pszArtist);

}

...

If the artist name info needs to be used later, substitute in your favorite pointer math or string/substring functions to leave the artist string intact. I think this strategy (storing the artists comma separated and displaying them "unravelled" so to speak) would handle all of the cases mentioned so far... Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be stored as Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Plus no extra storage is needed! Just a tiny bit of CPU.

The only *possible* drawback I can think of is that any artists which already have commas in them (???) would get munged, but I can't think of any... So this could be a config option...

Anyone think this is a good idea? I can't believe I didn't think of this before, so there *must* be a flaw in my logic here....

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Earth, Wind & Fire
Harry Connick, Jr.
Credence, Clearwater, Revival (I think)

just off the top of my head...

D'oh. I forgot about CSN&Y. CCR is just Creedence Clearwater Revival, no commas.

Okay so maybe another strategy would have to be employed... I guess if it was smart enough to deal with multiple commas then you could technically enter "Wind & Fire, Earth," and "Stills, Nash & Young, Crosby," but that would look really dumb in your MP3 tags. Either that, or have a bit set aside to "turn off" the automatic comma parsing for artists such as the ones you mentioned.

Sigh. Good catch.

Put it in the WISH list. I still love this idea. The bit to turn off the behaviour is nice too, but that needs more db space of course. I don't think I have any artist fields with commas right now.

Of course this will leave all your tracks looking different in other applications (not that *I* care about any other apps as much as the empeg...)

Bruno

Already in wish list. I ran over there as soon as I thought this idea through a little further.

Extra db space? It's only one bit per song, or possibly per artist. I can imagine the bit being part of the "artist" entry in the Artists soup view instead of the track... So that when you add new songs from CSN&Y you wouldn't have to set that attribute for each song, just the artist. Of course, we all know the soup entries are "virtual" entities that don't really exist unless they're part of a song, so that might get hairy.

Man I hope this happens. At this point I'm going to tag all my MP3's with the comma and pray to the gods of Empeg that this gets implemented. Even if it doesn't, I want my artists sorted right.

I'll go "me too" your post.

Bruno

then you could technically enter "Wind & Fire, Earth," and "Stills, Nash & Young, Crosby

How about:

Crosby\, Stills\, Nash\& Young ?? (OK, just kidding!)

I think your solution is great. It could be enough for me to bring back "The" in my tags. Setting a "sort on comma" bit to yes by default would seeme the best way, Another thought I had was to use a double comma as a sort comma, but that would look a bit nasty (course you wouldn't see it on the player) -- Clash,, The?

Will follow th Wish List with interest

Jim

I am going to write a book named 'The'. The only content in it will be the word "the". Then I'll copyright it. Now anyone who wants to plagerize my writings, aka intellectual property, will have to compensate me for it.

So I'd say your best bet is to leave 'the' out.

I had an idea about this that I submitted to the ID3v2 guys, who promptly rejected it. My idea was to designate a special character to be a delimiter between the name of the artist and a leading article.

To demonstrate, I'm going to use a tilde (~), but in reality, it would have been a control character or some other non-display character that would make no sense in an artist's name. So the artist field would look like "Beatles~The " (notice the trailing space) or "Amour~L'" (notice the apostrophe at the end and the lack of a trailing space). When a player needed to search or alphabetize or whatever, it would use the artist name as given, but, upon display, the part after the delimiter would be printed first and then the rest, without the delimiter.

They didn't like this suggestion because (1) it would break older decoders (to which I suggested using the field termination character as a delimiter, and got no response) and (2) because ID3v2 already has a sort-by tag.

Regardless of how Soup views get implemented on the player, I will not be changing the Artist fields to remove leading "The" or "A"

Soup views deal with articles properly (i.e The Doors gets sorted under D). Or at least, the Artists soup view does; the others currently don't.

One of the better suggestions (though costly in memory) was to allow using an alternate (new) field for sorting.

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.

Peter

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.