Hi,

I've been looking around these forums to find an answer, but I haven't so here I go...

Is there any way to sort the artisits in album list so that "The" dosen't count as a word, so "The Beatles" would be under B and so forth?

Thanks.

Nic

There's no automatic way to do this.

I use a tag called %artist.sort%, which holds the artist name as I wish it sorted. In Preferences > Album List > Views I've replaced all occurrences of %artist% with the following:

$if2(%artist.sort%,%artist%)

I also do this for my playlist sort strings.

Now, to save some work creating the tags, I've set up a couple of scripts in Masstagger:

The first script removes "The" from Artist and copies to Artist.sort:
click Add
choose: Format value from other fields
Destination: ARTIST.SORT
Source: $substr(%artist%,$add($strchr(%artist%, ),1),$len(%artist%))
I've named and saved this as "Artist to Artist.sort without The"

The second script formats Artist as "lastname, firstname" and copies to Artist.sort:
click Add
choose: Format value from other fields
Destination: ARTIST.SORT
Source: $substr(%artist%,$add($strrchr(%artist%, ),1),$len(%artist%)), $left(%artist%,$sub($strrchr(%artist%, ),1))
I've named and saved as "Artist to Artist.sort as lastname, firstname"

This looks like a lot of work, but once you have it set up, it's quick and easy. ;-)

The solution:
by artist(wo 'The'):
$if($stricmp($left(%artist%,4),'the '),$substr(%artist%,5,$len(%artist%))' (The)',%artist%)|[%album%]|[[%disc%.][$num(%tracknumber%,2).] ]$if2(%title%,%_filename_ext%)



And if you want to group artists by the first letter:
by artist(indexed):
$caps($cut(%artist%,1))|$if2(%artist%,%album artist%)|[%album%]|[[%disc%.][$num(%tracknumber%,2).] ]$if2(%title%,%_filename_ext%)

Thanks very much, thats exactly want I wanted.

Nic