Tags used as Sort Order Only ( Feature Request? )

[sidepipe]

Firstly, thanks Simon for giving us the almost perfect media server - but more than that for being so responsive to users... certain other authors could learn a thing or two

Wasn't sure where to post this, so it ended up in "General", feel free to move it!

There have been various threads about sort order etc, and I see that there has now been a kludge implemented to ignore "the" for example. I like artists ordered by surname where appropriate.. my current "solution" is to use the album artist tag to create my sort field, so I'd tag "Amos, Tori" for example. This isn't ideal though, because I don't like them showing up in the list that way.

It seems to me that the simple answer to all this would be to introduce a list of tags used to sort albums/artists which is just that - a sort list which does not get displayed itself but is just used for an ORDERBY or some such. We can already index custom tags and so I'm supposing that it wouldn't be that tricky to implement.

Unfortunately the best example here is iTunes, much as I dislike it It already has "Sort Artist" and "Sort Album Artist" tags ( which I think are actually soar and soaa ) which do this very thing... it even auto creates Sort Artist without the "The" if appropriate. So, in this example, you would add soaa and soar to the list of custom tags to index, and then specify the album sort order as something like "soaa,soar". If both are empty or not present, then Minim should fall back to using its previous fields.

It seems to me that this would give a generic and fairly easy to implement way of sorting based on user preferences, without resorting to separate files etc. You would not need the kludge for "The" any more either.

Apologies if this has been suggested before - even more so if its implemented and I didn't know . I'm very new to Minimserver, coming here because I gave up trying to get Twonky to sort stuff as I wanted, and this is actually the final piece in the jigsaw.