It seems to me that the idea of having a separate field for "Artist sort key" (or some less geeky name), which is automatically filled from the artist name until and unless explicitly hand-edited, is a better one -- partly because it's simpler, but mostly because it maps more naturally onto ID3v2. It can even get left blank if it ends up equal to the Artist field.

That works, too... But how are you defining "simpler?" The comma method only requires one ID3 field (TPE1 artist) to be filled out. I haven't seen *any* ID3v2 taggers which support the TSOP (artist sort order) frame. Without wide support of that frame, it's going to be difficult for everyone to properly tag their MP3's correctly.

The solution I proposed, while it might get ugly with a few artists which have commas in their name, wouldn't require a special ID3v2 tagger, in fact, it would work with V1 tags, which I'm sure many people are still using.

This is of course all in post-2.0-land...

But of course. I'm glad you guys are willing to talk about post-2.0 features with us. I'd like to hear what Roger has to say from an Emplode perspective. If Emplode were to actually become a full-fledged tagger as has been hinted at, my argument against using the TSOP frame might be moot.