Artist And Album Metadata With 'The' Word

[BOOTP]

Hi.

I am currently adding to and reviewing my ripped collection and wondering what others do for artists and albums that start with the article 'The'.

Currently, I have such artists with metadata stored like so:

Jimi Hendrix Experience, The
Mermen, The
Prodigy, The

This seems to work well, but (as expected) I now have far more albums that start with 'The'. I have such albums with metadata stored differently, like so:

The Ghosts That Haunt Me
The Secret Of Us
The Very Best Of Roy Orbison

I was wondering it is worth changing albums to follow the same approach as with artists for consistency, or just keep them as is.

I am interested how others approach this. I mainly use foobar2000 and GoneMAD.

Thanks.

[schmidj]

I put the "The" like yours for the artist, although I still have some to fix. Despite best efforts, metadata is riddled with typos, other efforts. Every now and then I look for errors, usually spotted when looking at the output of Asset or a similar database. I fix a bunch that I find until I have something more important to do. I leave the song and album titles with the "The" at the beginning as there is no real reason, for me, to move it. Another way, probably better to deal with artist names is to use the artist sort field. Artist : The Beatles. Artist Sort" Beatles, The. If you set your database to use artist sort, you'll find the Beatles under "B" but the name on the display will still be the "correct" "The Beatles". But I'd have to spend forever changing my 150,000 entries. More important things in life to do.

One trap to watch for is artists with more than one "best of" album, often by different record companies. If not given different album names, they both end up in the same directory, and if, by chance, different versions of the same song happen to be on the same track on two different "best of" albums, one will get written over if you aren't careful. I try to remember to put the record company name in parenthesis at the end of any "best of" album to avoid this. Incidentally, Verve issued two different "best of" albums, same title but different tracks, for one of their jazz artists. I forget the artist, but by chance I caught it when ripping, so one had (Verve 2) at the end of the album name.

One issue I never get to the end of, I have a lot of Caribbean calypso. The artists were often named like "Lord Kitchener" or "King Sparrow" or such. But many times the "Lord" is left off. So, the artist ends up getting separated into three sets: "Lord Kitchener", "Kitchener, Lord" (my preferred entry) and just "Kitchener" I'll spend forever sorting those out.

[simbun]

Like schmidj I use AlbumArtistSort and ArtistSort tags and leave Album alone, although I do use AlbumSort to ensure that natural sorting is used as some apps/servers still don't e.g. Now Music 11 comes before Now Music 9.

At the end of the day it's up to you and what your server/app supports. If you regularly trawl through big lists of albums without the ability to sort by AlbumSort then stripping 'The ' off the front might be the right thing to do.

For local music playback on Android you might want to try Symfonium. It's best when used with a server (Lightweight Music Server is highly recommended) but it's VERY capable and supports Android Auto too which is a big win (for me).

[dre]

I have a similar thing where compilations have artists starting with The and I want them left alone. I want to see The Prodigy, The Beatles, not Prodigy, The etc. Does anyone know how to stop this, I never had the issue with iTunes......and I am fed up of manaully changing them multiple times on compilation albums. Surely you should have a choice to change to a suffix or not?

[simbun]

I have a similar thing where compilations have artists starting with The and I want them left alone. I want to see The Prodigy, The Beatles, not Prodigy, The etc. Does anyone know how to stop this, I never had the issue with iTunes......and I am fed up of manaully changing them multiple times on compilation albums. Surely you should have a choice to change to a suffix or not?

In what app are you seeing 'Prodigy, The'?
Artist should be stored as 'The Prodigy' with ArtistSort as 'Prodigy, The'. Have you verified that in your tagging program? If you don't have one try Mp3tag.

[dre]

In what app are you seeing 'Prodigy, The'?
Artist should be stored as 'The Prodigy' with ArtistSort as 'Prodigy, The'. Have you verified that in your tagging program? If you don't have one try Mp3tag.

CD Ripper, lists ANY artist starting with The, puts it at the end. The Beatles, (Beatles, The) etc. Doesn't matter which database I choose for the metadata for the disc. If I don't manualy change it, that's how it's ripped. I'm fed up of having to do this manually, half of the artists on a funk CD I ripped today started "The" and all of them were listed with ,The at the end. "The Beloved" became "Beloved, The" etc......Frustrating as fk

[Spoon]

Answered here:

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-ripper/329448-artist-name-starting-with-the-being-changed