Sorting artists with "The" names

From experience with other media managers, the ignoring of prefixes is never going to produce a satisfactory result - adding these automagically generated strings to defined database columns is a good starting point though. You cannot automagically sort by surname or ignore "(We're Gonna) " in ;
(We're Gonna) Rock Around The Clock.

The difficult path is to give users more options, while staying simple and intuitive. UI design still tends to be rather tech heavy in use and is only understood by Tech savvy people like us.
In my opinion that's something this whole Industry has to overcome in order to take the next big leap.
This industry is relatively peaked out as it is right now. Every tech savvy person has at least one pc (plus consoles, plus mobiles, plus perhaps an umpc).
You need to make it intuitive and simple, to lure those into using pc's, that don't do it now.

I'm all for options, and in my opinion, this kind of feature should always be optional, as some people like it this and others that way. But the app has to stay understandable to someone just switching over to it.
Have you ever tried to configure something like "Audacity", or "VirtualDub"? Those are most awesome programs. Hell. One of the best. But one just can't use 'em without meditating over them for quite some time to even do the easiest tasks.

That's exactly what I don't expect from my media player and so far don't fear coming, as songbird is one of the most easy to use apps, I know. Very straight forward and it is immediately clear, where and what you have to do in order to accomplish the task you want done.
In my humble opinion, it has to stay that way, in Order to be the next big software hit of 2009 (the release of 1.0).

Long story short. Cram as many options into songbird, as you can. But never turn your back on usability.

Hi,

I am all for simplicity, but would listing Frank Zappa under F make Songbird easy for end users? The sort strings can be retrieved from MusicBrainz with little or no end-user effort.
Whilst I am quite happy to get to grips with the backend APIs, the basic functionality has to be there in the first place.

I think this is a great feature that should already be in the player as this is the way most of the major players sort track listings.

Since its not there you could just do what I do which is to change the name for artists like "The Cure" to read "Cure, The". I originally did this to simplify finding artists via the FileSystem Explorer but it also works to fix sorting in Songbird.

Hi,

It's a poor solution and as the most popular file formats have tags specifically for this purpose I can't see any justification for it not being in Songbird.
Might I also add that the sort fields need to be there also for Album and Track.
Other benefits of the sort fields are that you can bypass issues with accented characters and title case, etc.

What are the chances this will find its way into a build some time soon?

I'm definitely for the sortfield, which is in my sense indispensable. It would solve this issue (and many others) with little effort cause musicbrainz can fill them automagically

wanted to add my voice to this idea; would like to see this get done.

I am all for this idea, especially as speed browsing through the titles on a synced iPod gets slightly confusing at best. Speed browsing, after syncing my iTunes with Songbird means it goes "A...T....A....T....A....A...B....T.....B....T....B, etc". Slightly unusual, and not how the iPod normally behaves in that sense.

A "good" solution for this problem is tags id3v2. Just an extract of the standard :

TSOA
The 'Album sort order' frame defines a string which should be used
instead of the album name (TALB) for sorting purposes. E.g. an album
named "A Soundtrack" might preferably be sorted as "Soundtrack".

Localization of pseudo auto magic suppression of "The", "the", etc. is very difficult...

Hi - so this has been implemented? If so, how do I turn it on? I am having the problems with my iPod referenced in the other thread - namely that when I am scrolling through it goes A-T-B-T-C-T-D-T etc. and is a real pain to use now.

Ooooohhh that's why my iPod does that. I was wondering why it did the A-T-B-T-C-T-D etc. I hope this gets implemented soon cause that would be really nice for my library and iPod.

You can fix it in the meantime, by downloading YamiPod, connecting your iPod once, and then disconnecting. That fixes the A-T-B-T-C-T-D-T issue for me.

How do you use this feature?

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

It will be in the next release... 1.1.0

An employee needs to change the "The company implemented this idea." to "The company is working on this problem." to stop confusing people.

Please,
You all that is following this...
click on "stop following it" to stop follow...

This feature is now implemented...

Any word on when this will be in a stable release?

Sure. It's in the next release. Hitting SOON!

Any option to disable certain prefixes?
I don ́t want "A Perfect Circle" sorted with the P's!

PEOPLE, THE SONGBIRD HAS RELEASE AND THIS PROBLEM IS SOLVED...
PLEASE, unsubscribe THIS POST...