Comments on: My new filing technique is unstoppable

By: cennydd

cennydd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:00:45 +0000

Update to this: as it happened I stumbled across iTunes’s newish feature “Sort Artist” today. Allows you to manually force a particular sort order. So after some modestly tedious remapping and tagging, everything’s the way it should be.

I can sleep easy in my bed.

By: cennydd

cennydd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:57:56 +0000

Hi James, the reason I do it is to suit my own mental models. iTunes does accommodate the definite article, but not the reversal of Surname, Forename. Rather than have to remember which rules iTunes supports, I choose to encode my preference within the metadata. This probably stems from the days when I had great big CD racks; the physical retrieval made efficiency a lot more important.

There are also minor complication around edge cases. For instance, take Les Savy Fav. Should this be reversed to Savy Fav, Les? I don’t think iTunes reverses the French definite article. That decision is probably best left to the user, who knows the context and has a mental model already established.

Great that last.fm are looking into this. It’s an undoubtedly tricky IA challenge.

By: James Wheare

James Wheare — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:44:01 +0000

Also, isn’t the “The” reversal redundant as iTunes ignores it when sorting? Also, we’re working on artist name aliasing as Last.fm. Phase one is a little “did you mean?” yellow bar at the top: http://www.last.fm/music/National%2C+The

By: Paul Annett

Paul Annett — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:48:27 +0000

Playing devil’s advocate, would you place Ben Folds’ solo material under F, but music by the band Ben Folds Five under B?

And would you adhere to the ‘title case throughout’ rule, even for a band such as easyworld, who spell their name with a lowercase ‘e’? If not, would the case dictate a different position in the alphabetical list, maybe uppercase before lowercase, putting easyworld after E-Z Rollers, The in your collection?