Eh.. Hmm. I don't like the special character, actually the best idea I've heard was using a double comma for "escaped commas" kind of like a double backslash is an escaped backslash. So it'd look like this:

"Beatles, The"
"Crosby,, Stills,, Nash & Young"

I agree that CSN&Y looks ugly if you're playing it in WinAMP, but how many artists have *real* commas in them? Emerson, Lake and Palmer.. CSN&Y... John, Paul, George & Ringo.. Oh wait, nevermind, that's Beatles, The. But there's not that many out there. There are far more that you would want to add the comma for to sort them properly, including all of the "The" artists as well as solo artists from Amos, Tori to Zevon, Warren.

Also, I don't see why you'd need to include the trailing space. I think the player's algorithm for displaying it could just add a space automatically, since you always want one between the last word of the part after the comma and the first word. It should just be an implied space.. When would you not want the space, or when would you need more than one space? I can't think of any reasons why a single implied space (not saved in the artist field) wouldn't work. It's a pain to make sure that a space is at the end of each one... I'd just embed it in the player's algorithm instead.

Please someone from Empeg tell me this is a good idea and has a chance to make a 2.1 release.