Can the library ignore 'The' in artist names?

Having adopted Audirvana after using JRiver, I am wondering if it is possible to ignore ‘The’ when sorting artist names…so ‘The Beatles’ goes up with the B’s, where I expect it, not down in the T’s with all the other bands starting with ‘The.’ This was a useful feature in JRiver, and easy to do there. Thanks.

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Click a Beatles album, when you see the tracks look up right of cover and click the group name to see all albums of them.

Then open info tag panel icon on the right of window. There you will see The Beatles and rename sorting to Beatles only… or Beatles The or whatever you want and save

Yes, thanks, that is OK as a “work around/” Problem is, I have 140+ bands in the library starting with ‘The’ so it might be a little tedious. I was thinking more of an ‘Always ignore “The” in artist names’ button as some other players have. But thanks for the reply anyway.

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140 bands, 30 seconds each… not much time in a life to be happy…

Well, yeah, but with multiple albums by each band, it’s gonna take a chunk of time, so the “30 seconds each” isn’t going to apply. Anyway, I took the time today to do it. Trouble is…I have two computers running Audirvana (office and living room) which run independent of each other. I don’t think I’ll go through all this again on the second PC. Does Audirvana have any kind of server/client set-up? Boy oh boy, I love the sound of Audirvana, but the library/ripping/tagging etc. in JRiver just works so nice…especially since changes to the the server are reflected in the client PC

when you click the Beatles name when in one album… you see all your The Beatles album covers… maybe you have 20 albums you see there… you open the info panel and see the artist The Beatles, you just put Beatle in the sort fields and voilà all album are now in Beatles… you don’t have to tag each album… same with me, have over 130 albums of Frank Zappa… sort them as Zappa Frank and in two seconds later all 130 albums are place in Z not anymore in F…

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Yes, I get that. I am sorting all the albums by ‘The Beatles’ into just ‘Beatles’ just in one manoevre. But, it takes up to five minutes on my system for the syncing to run if I have 40-70 albums by that one band. So, no, I am not tagging each individual album, but I am going through the library and tagging each artist and waiting while all the albums by that artist are synced.

Get an external editor, change for all albums the ArtistSort tag, save and synchronize in Audirvana once. Done!
Many external editor will let you use some functionality to bulk edit your tracks

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What would be ab example of an ‘external editor’?

On macOS there are Yate/2manyrobots, Metadatics, DBPoweramp, Kid3, and many other (I use Yate, the best on my opinion).
On Windows Mp3tag, Kid3, DBPoweramp, Picard/Musicbrainz …

Ah yes, I see. I have been continuing to rip and curate with JRiver, which offers the tagging option of ignoring ‘The’ in artist names, but that doesn’t carry over to Audirvana when I sync files.

That’s a JRiver algorithm, not a tag content.
As you are using JRiver too you can use it to change the ArtistSort tag, in this case the change will be carry over to Audirvana

I thought I was changing the ArtistSort tag in JRiver. Every single album that I rip in JRiver, including new artists, sorts it by ignoring ‘The’. But no transfer to Audirvana. Noticeably, the files appear in Windows File Explorer with ‘The.’ So, there’s the issue, maybe.

Use JRiver as your external editor , check if the ArtistSort tag is “save in file tag” (Tools>Options>Library & Folder> Manage Library Fields) , its an option you have to set when the tag is created it can’t be editted

If not drop the tag and recreated with Save to file enabled . Make sure before you do that any ReadOnly properties on the file folder are cleared !!

PS have you realised that you can’t run Audirvana and JRiver servers simultaneously ?

Any Problems maybe PM me …

All of the suggestions, as the original poster says, are workarounds, it doesn’t matter how quickly you might implement such workarounds they’re still kludgy. The real solution, implemented by many other audio interfaces, is to allow a list of definite and indefinite articles that the ordering ignores (The, Le, Les etc).

Sorting issues like this is about grabbing one finger for the hand. Apart from prefix patterns, I can immediately think of name before firstname ordering. So for the famous The Beatles sorting under B example there is my immediate wish for automatically ordering Paul McCartney under M rather than P.

In the early days of my mp3 ripping (that started about 20 years ago) I tried to accomplish that problem with the workaround naming the artist McCartney, Paul. Eventually, it started a battle with public databases I didn’t win.

So the programmer’s dilemma now is to think of a full scale solution rather then solving a single The issue.

Don’t forget Sir and Dame in conductors and soloists …

Update: Actually, once I have instructed Audirvana to ‘sort as’ (e.g. sort ‘The Beatles’ as ‘Beatles’) it will sort any new rips by that artist, from JRiver, in the correct way (under ‘Beatles’) while retaining the artist name as ‘The Beatles’. If I rip something by an artist that is not already present as an artist in Audirvana, I can simply modify that artist’s ‘sort as’ at the time. So, yes, it does kinda work.

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