This is a rehash of some stuff I've posted (multiple times) in the past, and has probably been mentioned by others as well. With the advent of the new browsing methods (by artist, album, year, etc), it is important to be able to sort in more advanced ways. For instance, when listing by artist, the artists that start with "The" should not all be grouped together. I propose the addition of "sort keys" to the database for the artist, album, and track title fields, which can be optionally used (via a toggle in Emplode, similar to the planned toggle for listing the playlist hierarchy in alphabetical vs. emplode order) to control the order in which various automatically-generated hierarchies are displayed. These sort keys can be present in ID3v2.4.0 tags, are easily set to defaults (default sort key for an artist is the artist's name (perhaps with some intelligent searching to eliminate leading articles), default sort key for an album is either its year or its name (or ideally a combination of these), default sort key for a track is its track number) and would be easy for users to manipulate en masse using the multiple track info edit functionality of Emplode. This would allow the default "artist", "album", "year" and "genre" hierarchies, which will eventually be available for browsing directly on the player, to be sorted in a customizable fashion. For many people, it would eliminate the need for many of the playlists on their player. Speaking from personal experience, even when a combined "artist/album" hierarchy exists, I will still have to have my own artist/album playlist hierarchy to get the sorting (alphabetical by artist without consideration of articles, chronological by album) I want; this would eliminate that need, and could also be completely automated by judicious use of existing and future ID3 tagging tools when generating the audio files in the first place. Comments?

All sounds good to me. I was holding back from asking for anything like this until after 2.0 was released. Usually it's a good idea to ask for major features before something goes into beta. But of course, the guys at empeg could be working with a different development model in mind. :)

I like seeing band names with the word "The" properly placed in front (if it's part of that band's name at all of course), but I like them to be sorted where they belong, and not all together. Same goes for albums. I sort mine within each artist group by year. Right now I've actually got the year as part of the folder names on my backup disk, otherwise I wouldn't be able to sort them in explorer. With the functionality of tags and database fields in the player, I could to away with this.

Bruno