Sort Feature

[TheCharlie]

I have a ton of songs that start with "The" in the title, so my smart lists by default dump these all into the "T" section. I figured changing the smart list to sort by the sort field, then populating that field with the actual first letter (e.g. "The Descent" is filed under "D") would work. This is a pretty reasonable solution except for two problems:

1. I have to manually edit these and if I forget to do so when I add a song, it sorts to "no value" at the bottom (this is not a big deal).
2. The sort is still alphabetical by title, so orders end up a little wonky (e.g. "The Descent" will actually be after "Down by the Water" because it will sort to the "T" instead of the "De").

Problem 1 is easy to fix by just keeping my lists up to date. Problem 2 might be a little tougher because I might need to build in multiple levels ("De," "Do,"), which will make the quick nav for long lists quite cumbersome.

Wondering if anyone has any tips to resolve this? If I was proposing a feature, I would allow for an option to sort by "smart" title, which would eliminate "the," "a," "an," "of," and some other words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles) from the sort order. This would be similar to an encyclopedia sort.

[arlo]

I hadn't even noticed it was doing this. Ideally you wouldn't have to do anything special to make the titles sort logically. I'll look into this as part of the next update. I'll post back here when I find out what I can do with this.

If you need an immediate workaround, it might be easier to write your titles like "Weight, The" or just "Weight" instead of "The Weight." You could do the same for artists ("Band" instead of "The Band") if you want to sort by artist.

[TheCharlie]

Hey Arlo - Thanks for the workaround! Definitely a simple option. I'd love if it was automatic though! Thanks for looking into this!

[arlo]

I looked into this and there is no sorting function like this built into any of the platforms BandHelper runs on (iOS, Android or LAMP). So I would have to define the articles to ignore, in all the languages BandHelper is translated into, and then write custom code to do the sorting for all three platforms.

It's not out of the question, but I was hoping for the reliability of a built-in solution. So I'll put this on my wish list.