Tagging artists that start with "the"?

[supercomputer500]

What are your guys personal methods? Is there a universal way for non ipods? I have lots of bands that start with the, like The Beatles/The Beach Boys/The Mars Volta/etc. It is a little annoying having a whole group of the's. Any recommended techniques on how to bypass this? I wouldn't really want to tag them in ways like Beatles, The/Beach Boys, The. Any ideas?

Thanks guys/girls.

P.S. - Sorry if this in the the wrong forum, I wasn't exactly sure where to post it/

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

I enter the artist as the artist is actually listed. If "The" is part of the artist's actual name, then that's how I list it. The multiple "The" items hasn't been an issue since I can easily and quickly scroll through the list on my player. Plus, if "The" is actually part of the artist's name that's where I immediately go to search for the artist.

I've not found multlple "The" items an issue and trying other methods has created some confusing issues:

- Some "the" groups don't actually have "The" part of their name. An example of this is the Carpenters (the group's actual name is just "Carpenters" with no "The" in front of it).

- When having two more groups as the artist for a song, putting "The" after the each artist's name can create a confusing listing. An example of this is the soundtrack for the movie "A Mighty Wind." Putting "The" after the artist's name creates this artist for at least one track: "Folksman, The, Mitch & Mickey, New Main Street Singers, The."

I hope this helps.

[HulkSmashNow]

The nice thing about PowerAMP on my phone is that it sorts them by the first letters of their names rather than "The" that comes before them. A truly great feature for an already awesome music player.

[skip252]

I haven't found a universal standard for dealing with "The". I've seen dozens of discussions and the conclusion is usually it's a matter of preference. Some prefer to keep the name as is and just deal with having to scroll past dozens of artists starting with The. Others move it to the end or leave it off all together.

With my collection I found the letter "T" part of my listing was much larger than any other when I tried searching by artist. Trying to find a particular artist became too unwieldy so I spent an a bit of time re-tagging my collection.

That's when I found there was no rule I could apply across the board. I think of them as The Beatles not Beatles, The. Dada Weatherman is what I think when I'm looking for them so I swapped the prefix. Doing it that way didn't completely eliminate the bulk in the "T" category but cut it by about 80% for me.

[WalkGood]

Keep it simple and do what works best for you or as skip stated "it's a matter of preference." That said, I tag all my stuff beginning with the word "the" - "artist, the."

[Tapeworm]

Just buy a Clip Zip. It automatically drops the "The" in Artist's names when using the original firmware (not Rockbox). Some like this, others don't. It would be nice if this was a user-selectable option, and this was suggested to SanDisk but not implemented.

[Brett_val]

I do find it annoying, that large list of bands beginning with "The". But I blame those bands for all using the same prefix instead of making it more complicated for me by changing their names. The only reason I can think of why someone would do this, is to make the list of artists appear more "spread" - which doesn't make much sense to me when it means changing the official bandname.

As CDMP3PlayerFan said, when I'm looking for "The Black Dahlia Murder" I look for them under the "T", and it would be much more confusing if they were listed under "B" instead.

I don't think I'd like the Zip's OF if it does this. I only use Rockbox on my Zip so I haven't noticed it.

[WalkGood]

“The” is an easy fix for those that do their own tagging, the bitch is compilation albums :/

[kp-j3]

I definitely do "Artist The" because I don't want any escaping nonsense while moving stuff around, no dots, commas, exclamation points, ampersands, etc. Of course I don't have any "The The" But I'm a Lastname Firstname tagger too.

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Originally Posted by WalkGood

“The” is an easy fix for those that do their own tagging, the bitch is compilation albums :/

I have a simple solution for this: I set the "Album Artist" to "Various Artists" (you could also use "Compilation") while setting the "Artist" to the song's actual performer.

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Originally Posted by kp-j3

I definitely do "Artist The" because I don't want any escaping nonsense while moving stuff around, no dots, commas, exclamation points, ampersands, etc. Of course I don't have any "The The" But I'm a Lastname Firstname tagger too.

After doing a little checking, I noticed that my Walkman takes care of the issue by disregarding "The" when sorting the artists ("The" is there but it doesn't affect the sort). As an example, the following are how The Beatles and the artists around them appear on my list of artists on my Walkman:

• Barry White

• The Beach Boys

• The Beatles

• The Beau Brummels

• Becky Hobbs

In the same way, MediaMonkey gives you the option of disregarding "The" in the same way when sorting by artists.

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by CDMP3PlayerFan

I have a simple solution for this: I set the "Album Artist" to "Various Artists" (you could also use "Compilation") while setting the "Artist" to the song's actual performer.

"Various Artists" is how I've always done it but to be honest I don't like it as I look from music by Artist/Album folder structure. With a few albums I have experimented altering the artist field to include the album name hyphen artist name, which has worked better for me since I tend to look via artist first. For example the format string %album-artist% - $num(%track%,2) - %title% versus %artist% - %album% - $num(%track%,2) - %title%