Okay, this is a bit of a cross-post because nobody reads General anymore.

I recently downloaded my entire collection for a mass re-tagging and cleanup, and I started to think about how to enter artists with names like "The Doors." I posed my question in the General forum, and found that others have varying strategies:

"The Doors" - Fuzzy matching finds it, but it is sorted with the T's instead of the D's.
"Doors" - Fine for searches and sorting, but doesn't look quite right.
"Doors, The" - Fine for searches and sorting, looks really stupid.

Furthermore, some people that solo artists be sorted by last name rather than first name. Currently the Empeg (and any other player on the planet) is going to sort "Tori Amos" with the T's instead of the A's. Thinking back, I always sorted my CD's by last name and didn't even think twice about it, but it does make more sense to sort by last name (like the record stores do.)

So I thought up this idea (I'll be really embarassed if it's been asked for before.) Allow users to tag their MP3's and enter into Emplode with artists in Lastname, Firstname format. (Or any other comma-separated string such as Doors, The.) Use that string in the FID files and the database, and internally for sorting. But when displaying the artists, switch it around (easy to code), with the part after the comma first and the part before the comma last. This would ideally be done in both Emplode and the player.

In this manner, users can decide how their artists get sorted, and the artists will still be displayed correctly. It's not dependent on locale-specific stuff like what your definite article happens to be, etc. True, it's more work than allowing the player to automatically parse out "The", but I think it's more flexible, and the benefits outweigh any disadvantages I can see. With artist soup views on the horizon, I think this will be even more of a bonus.

So... comments?