48 chars gets all that I care about out of my 1902 different artists. I don't care about these three getting truncated, they aren't on my empeg anyway.

Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Shania Twain & Carole King
Whitney Houston, Chaka Kahn, Faith Hill, Brandy, LeAnn Rimes, & Mary J Blige
Methods Of Mayhem, Tommy Lee, Fred Durst, Lil' Kim, Crystal Method, George Clinton

took me a minute to figure out how to find out what the longest artist name in my collection are. If anyone's interested, I can post the sort perl bits I wrote and the command line process it all.