Alphabetical Order word "The"

That's the way iTunes alphabetizes; it will not automatically ignore "The", "A" etc. but treat the name literally, as shown. If you want to have your artists alphabetized without a leading word, you have to rename the band to "Kovenant, The" or just "Kovenant"

Most people complain the opposite way....the don't want to sift through a bunch of "The ...." artists.

Oops, sorry, misread the issue, addressed the issue of the song title, and it's too late to edit my post.

Most artists will be sorted ignoring the "The". As Katrina says, that's the way most people want it. I'm not sure if there's a way to edit the artist name so that the list includes "The" as the beginnning for alphabetizing.

hi y'all!

actually there is a way of convincing itunes to display "The Kovenant" alphabetically under T rather than K. you'll need to manually edit the artist field for the songs though.

i'll walk you through an example. i'm using itunes 6.0.4.2. but Thomas S. and I first worked out how to do this with itunes 4.9. so my guess is that it would work for any version in between.

the trick involves replacing the ordinary space between the "The" and "Kovenant" (ordinary in the sense that it is the one that you can produce by hitting the space bar) with the space character produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 0160.

for an example, here's a screenshot of "Pacer" by The Amps, showing up in my main library alphabetised under "A":

"The Amps" under "A"

now i right-click on Pacer, and select "Get Info".

i click on the "Info" tab.

in the "artist" field i replace the ordinary space with the space produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 0160, and then click "OK".

... and now Pacer is showing up under T:

"The Amps" under "T"

love, b

Uh in fact I have exactly the opposite problem, Itune and Ipod decided to sort artists starting with "The" under "T" and not the name. Would you know how I could restore the situation?

Itune and Ipod decided to sort artists starting with "The" under "T" and not the name. Would you know how I could restore the situation?

intriguing. let's start running through some of the simpler possibilities.

what version of itunes are you running? (i think some of the earlier versions of iTfW 4.x used to alphabetise "The" under T.)

love, b

Oooops discovered the solution.... With the last version of Itunes I downloaded the french version (I live in Switzerland and speak french too)... and it files artists starting with "the" under "T". I re-installed the english version and al is sorted.
Thanks all the same!

Cheers

many thanks for the report, niklaslaslas!

... just out of curiosity, are you using itunes 4.9 or earlier? (starting with 5.0.0.35, the seperate language versions were consolidated into a single installer.)

thinking that with itunes 6.0.2.23 or higher, we may be able to use the change display language functions to get back the "English" standard alphabetisations for people:

iTunes: Changing the display language in Windows

love, b

Its version 6.0.4. Hadn't thought of trying to change the language setting... but it works! Hurrah! nice subtleties...

woohoo! i like threads in which i learn new things. thanks for trialling that idea for me!

love, b

It should be noted that in the English language, it is correct to ignore words such as "A" and "The" when alphabetizing.

That doesn't make them any less part of the name of the song, artist, book, or whatever. Many people here might be too young to have ever received training on searching library resources and filing systems. 🙂

🙂 glad to be of help, ReaperFromHell!

love, b