Re: [PATCH 2/2] tree: smarter artist naming and sorting

[Timo H. <tih...@gm...>]

Frank Terbeck <ft...@be...> wrote:

> > Another possible problem might be ARTISTSORT tag.  How should you
> > compare ARTIST="The Prodigy" (optionally becomes "Prodigy" when
> > comparing) and ARTISTSORT="Prodigy, The"?  I find the *SORT tags ugly
> > and I don't think any of my files have them.
> 
> I know, none of my files do. :)
> And I don't actually fully understand the concept behind it. Could
> someone clarify what it does or point me to a web location that
> describes it understandably?

AFAIK ARTISTSORT and ALBUMSORT _should_ be used only for sorting.  The
tags can be used the way you like. Examples:

ARTISTSORT="Gilmour, David"
ARTISTSORT="Beatles, The"

> However, the current code does the following for me:
> 
>     "The Prodigy"           ->   "Prodigy, The"
>     "The Rolling Stones"    ->   "The Rolling Stones"
> 
> That should definitely be smarter, even if it's optional.

Hmm, maybe you have ALBUMARTIST or ARTISTSORT set to "The Rolling
Stones".  Current code uses them literally, that is, automatic "The "
skipping is used only if there is no "fancy" artist name.

> And that would probably be useful for English-only libraries. If, for
> example, you got some German music too, artists like "Die Ärzte" would
> not become "Ärzte, Die". That would make sorting pretty inconsistent
> again. Maybe another option?
> 
>         fuzzy_articles=The:Die:Der:Das
> 
> Just an idea. I wouldn't enable "fuzzy_artist", so I don't care that
> much about how this would be handled.

Optional "the " skipping should solve 90% of the problem.  Doing same
for other languages would be a bit too much in my opinion :)

Here's my proposition:

Determine artist name in this order (not sure about *SORT):

	ALBUMARTISTSORT
	ALBUMARTIST
	ARTISTSORT
	COMPILATION ("<Compilations>")
	ARTIST
	"<No name>"

Store the name as it is and optionally sort by skipping "The " and
optionally display it in "Foo, The" format.

If we want to support fixing artist names ("Beatles" -> "The Beatles")
then we could skip "The " when comparing artist names for equality.

There's just one problem, the ARTISTSORT tag.  If it was set to
"Beatles, The" it wouldn't match "Beatles".  ARTISTSORT can be used in
different ways so I don't want to add too much "intelligence" to that
part.

We should either make *SORT only affect sorting or stop using the tags.
Currently artists are sorted using the strings that are visible in the
artist/album window.