Sorting Album Artists by 'The'

[Stephen_Denton]

Is it possible to have Roon sort by ‘The’ in an artist’s name?

As in putting ¨The Who¨ under ‘T,’ rather than ‘W’?
I’m sure it must be possible, but I can’t see how, so can some kind soul point me in the right direction?

Cheers,
Steve

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

You can edit the artist sort order individually by artist:

There is currently no way to change it globally. You can vote for the feature suggestion:

Editable list of ignored articles when sorted by name

it would be great, if the list of ignored articles could be edited and articles of other languages than English could be added. At the moment it seems, that only ‘The’ is ignored.

[Stephen_Denton]

That’s great for now, thank you very much indeed

[Stephen_Denton]

I spoke too soon…or does it take a while for changes to take effect?

[Stampie]

I wonder what happens if an ‘Artist Sort’ tag is added to the metadata stating ‘The Who’ rather than “Who, The” - does Roon use or ignore this value? worth a try if you haven’t already.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

It should happen immediately. Does The Who work and sort into T? If that works (and I think it should because someone else did this before and reported it working), then maybe there is an issue with Numbers and The.

EDIT: Apparently it does not, I just tried. Oh god. I was sure that it does and someone confirmed it in the past, so didn’t check again But I found that there is a workaround: Omit the spaces in the sort order field in the artist editor (I have artist name Sort by Last Name in Settings):

Alphabetical order of Artists

If you use ThePolice (no spaces) in the Last-First Sort Name field, that will work (assuming you have sort by last name set). This field is only used for sorting and doesn’t display in the artist listings.

Side note:

The sort name works for me generally and I use it all the time actually, though not with The because I am fine with “Who, The”. So I didn’t recall this no-space requirement from the top of my head. E.g. what works for me:

• Roon does not recognize the German “Die” instead of The, so if an artist is “Die Türen” it gets sorted under D. Then I change the sort order to “Türen, Die”, and this works.
• It also works in cases where there is a band with an artist name and this is not reflected by default in the artist’s sort order info. E.g., Mark Lanegan is sorted into L by default (if sorting is set to Artist Last Name), but Mark Lanegan Band was sorted into M. So I changed that to “Lanegan, Mark Band”, and this works as well.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@Stephen_Denton The behavior confused me a lot and I kept editing the above post, with many intermediate states of the post turning out to be wrong. So if you looked in the meantime, forget what you saw But now it should be OK and I think you will find the solution, above

[Holger]

So finally a way to get the band „The The“ sorted in the right way

[joel]

@Holger

„The The“ sorted in the right way

That’s purely an opinion. For example, in the Wikipedia article:

During the The’s more prolific period of releases

MusicBrainz also has “The, The” as the sort name. (Edit that at your peril.)

But yes, you can edit the sort name in Roon to “The The” if you wish. It won’t make much difference to sorting of course.

[joel]

@Holger I should add that I think that “The The” is probably correct for a sort key. You’d talk about a Beatles song (no “The”), but you wouldn’t talk about a The song. People would think you’re deranged.

[Stephen_Denton]

Hallelujah! The ‘no space’ trick works. Not tried it with the numbers one as yet, but The 'Oo works. Thanks muchly.

Coming to something where Apple Music has a “sure, you can do that” feature, while Roon is “meh!”

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

I like that we both have The Thermals and Who next to each other

[Stephen_Denton]

Great minds and so on…