Ran into this (once again) for albums beginning with The.

Now that 3.0.3 is out, can I request that this be "on the list" for version 3.0.4?

My Preference is two-fold:

1) Maintain correct meta-data for all fields. "The Wall" is NOT the same as "Wall, The". I spend a lot of time getting, and keeping, my Library organized and "properly" tagged.

2) Provide for ignore prefix sort orders in all views. Artist, Album and Title are probably the most important ones. e.g. One thing "ignore prefix" in MP3Tag allowed me to do was to clean up tag prefix inconsistencies by grouping them together.

It is not a huge issue as I am more likely to Search than to Navigate the tree.

That said, one thing that might help is to maintain the currently selected track when switching views. That would provide quick navigation to selected Artist, Album, etc.

My 3cents.

Edit: Oops, just tried "Find more from same..." in track context menu. Works a treat.

[quote="rusty"]-'Ignore prefixes' is for people who want to retain the metadata exactly as it originally appeared, but sort it differently.

Is that roughly what you're looking for?[/quote]
Exactly! I don't want the tags to move the prefix, I want the sort to reflect the move. By all means, the tags should always retain the original metadata (artist, album, title, etc.) but the library should have options to indicate a sort order -- thus "ignore prefix" should be applied across the board, not just to artist.

[quote]btw, my 'gut feel' is usually based on observation and listening. I ask 'average users' to do certain tasks with MediaMonkey and get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Then I listen to what users say on the forum. In the case of this feature, my recollection is that people's major gripe was about 'Artists', but if that's too limiting, we'll need to fix it.[/quote]
Fair enough. I do think that MM is terribly limited in sorting options now. I'd be very pleased if you offered more flexibility. I realize that's a major enhancement so I wouldn't expect this soon. Anytime in the future would be nice. :)

[quote](I will have a look at CATraxx--just tried it, but it crashed on startup).[/quote]
D'oh! Sorry about that. I've had very few problems with it and I've been using it for years! Once you do get it running, you'll find that most of the major fields have a "Sort by" counterpart: Artist, Album Title, Track Title, any of the "person" fields. These are just off the top of my head. Note that for People, sort by uses a "Lastname, Firstname" mechanic but it must be set once on a per person basis (simple click of an arrow changes sort order). It's extremely easy to organize and browse the database with these in place. I'd love it if MM could adopt a similar structure. Keep in mind that CATraxx was a cataloging program before it implemented any sort of tagging functionality. At this point I'm not interested in changing the way MM writes tags, only the way it [i]sorts[/i].

Thanks for your time. :)

Cheers,
Paula

spacefish,

I might be misunderstanding you, but if you modify track tags to change the way your Albums are prefixed e.g.

The Wall --> Wall, The

then the albums will be shown in the tree based on their tags (i.e. 'Wall, The' will be displayed with Albums beginning in 'W').

i.e. I'd consider the 2 features to be somewhat independent:
-changing tags is for people who really want their tags (and perhaps filenames) to ignore 'The'
-'Ignore prefixes' is for people who want to retain the metadata exactly as it originally appeared, but sort it differently.

At the moment, our UI indicates:
Ignore prefixes when sorting by Artist: _____________

We would probably have to modify the UI to allow the user to select which fields should be ignored. e.g.
Ignore prefixes when sorting [Textbox of fields]: _______________

Since this involves a string change, it would have to wait until the next major release.

Is that roughly what you're looking for? (I will have a look at CATraxx--just tried it, but it crashed on startup).

btw, my 'gut feel' is usually based on observation and listening. I ask 'average users' to do certain tasks with MediaMonkey and get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Then I listen to what users say on the forum. In the case of this feature, my recollection is that people's major gripe was about 'Artists', but if that's too limiting, we'll need to fix it.

-Rusty

But rusty, a [b]$MovePrefix(<Album>) [/b] and [b]$MovePrefix(<Title>) [/b]will move 'The' to the end of those strings so you [i]are [/i]permitting that functionality, just not everywhere, e.g. the tree. In my opinion, it's even more important here because the tree is where I browse my collection.

I can't imagine why folks would be annoyed that articles in album titles like 'The' or 'A' or 'An' were ignored. I know that I am annoyed that when I want to find "The Best of Julie London" which should be near the top of the tree, I have to go almost to the bottom and then scan through everything else that starts with "The" before I can find it. Perhaps you should make a poll and ask everyone. :)

As for your "gut feel", I'd be really interested in what experience you've had with sorting, collating, and cataloging in general, that you feel 'The' at the beginning of an album title is in any way meaningful to its sort order. In my experience, 'The' is always ignored as are 'A' and 'An'. That experience comes primarily from cataloging fiction and literature; I've maintained the same schema in my audio and video cataloging as well.

For more information, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Abbreviations_and_common_words
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog#Sorting

I would also be very interested to know if the MM dev team is still planning some type of sortname functionality where I can use auto-organize to move John Lennon albums to E:\Music\Lennon, John\ without having to edit the path or mask directly.

It might be beneficial for you to take a look at [url=http://www.fnprg.com/catraxx/index.html]CATraxx[/url], another audio cataloging program, and see how it handles sorting, et. al., not from a coding standpoint, but from a usability one. That program is much more robust in sheer data handling but lacks quite a bit of functionality in general playback and is not as aesthetically appealing as MM. Oh, if only the two programs could be merged, I'd be in paradise!

Cheers,
Paula

$if($eql($strstr(%artist%,The ),1),$mid(%artist%,5,$len(%artist%)),%artist%)

"Perhaps what's needed is a feature to allow prefixes to be ignored on a configurable basis (per field)... "

I had a similar gripe about MP3TAG's Artist sort order when I first started using it, Found out that they supported custom sort orders for any column.

The sort mask I use in MP3Tag is
[code]
$if($eql($strstr(%artist%,The ),1),$mid(%artist%,5,$len(%artist%)),%artist%)
[/code]

Need to read through all your mask functions to see what the equivalent mask would be in MM.

A more general solution than you are considering, but, the same in principle.

It was an intentional design decision to not apply this to anything but Artist. The rationale was that in the context of Artist, 'The' is often of little semantic value and users are likely to want to ignore the prefix.

But in the context of an Album Title or Track Title, there aren't such a huge proportion of Albums or Tracks preceded by 'The' and removing the prefix globally could often have unintended consequences (i.e. more people would be annoyed by such a fix than are annoyed by the current situation).

I don't have any data to back up that assertion, just a gut feel...

Perhaps what's needed is a feature to allow prefixes to be ignored on a configurable basis (per field)...

-Rusty

[quote="spacefish"]It seems to work fine for albums (from the tree), but (track) titles are sorted in a single-letter folder and for sure, [i]The Battle of Evermore[/i] appears in the [i]T [/i]folder but not the [i]B [/i]folder, where I expected it. I think this is a miss? MM has very little sorting functionality now, it would be nice to get the [i]ignore prefix[/i] option working globally.[/quote]

Amen

It seems to work fine for albums (from the tree), but (track) titles are sorted in a single-letter folder and for sure, [i]The Battle of Evermore[/i] appears in the [i]T [/i]folder but not the [i]B [/i]folder, where I expected it. I think this is a miss? MM has very little sorting functionality now, it would be nice to get the [i]ignore prefix[/i] option working globally.

Can anyone answer the previous question?
I think it would be nice if it did.

Why does this "ignore prefix" option only apply to Artists, and not Album & Track title?

Yes, I can confirm this bug.

When I browse my library by genre, artists starting with "The" are now listed with other artists starting with "T" rather than the proper letter. If I browse my library by Artist, those same bands are listed in the correct location. I also just noticed this in version 1140.