[Empeg-general] Re: The word "the"

[wfaulk@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

I had an idea about this that I submitted to the ID3v2 guys, who promptly rejected it.  My idea was to designate a special character to be a delimiter between the name of the artist and a leading article.

To demonstrate, I'm going to use a tilde (~), but in reality, it would have been a control character or some other non-display character that would make no sense in an artist's name.  So the artist field would look like "Beatles~The " (notice the trailing space) or "Amour~L'" (notice the apostrophe at the end and the lack of a trailing space).  When a player needed to search or alphabetize or whatever, it would use the artist name as given, but, upon display, the part after the delimiter would be printed first and then the rest, without the delimiter.

They didn't like this suggestion because (1) it would break older decoders (to which I suggested using the field termination character as a delimiter, and got no response) and (2) because ID3v2 already has a sort-by tag.