iTunes: Sorting by individual artist's last names?

[Jim Chokey]

Thanks to all who responded to my last set of iTunes questions--
both on and off the group.

Here's one more for you:

The CDDB that iTunes connects to always returns the
names of individual artists by first name and then
last name. This means that iTunes ends up sorting
them alphabetically by the *first* name of the artist,
rather than by the artist's last name (which is more
typical).

I know I can just go and retype the artists name
as [Last name, First Name], so that it will sort
by last name, but that's a bit of a bother. I don't
suppose there's anyway to get iTunes to do this
automatically?

-- Jim C.

[Greg Weston]

In article <gcjV9.146$eQ7.82...@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>, Jim
Chokey <jchokdontyou...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Not really, because iTunes doesn't really have any idea whether the
name it's seeing is something that _should_ be sorted by anything other
than a simple lexical compare. Van Halen _is_ a last name, albeit in
two parts, that should go under V. Van Morrison is a person who should
be under M. Jethro Tull is a person whose name was adopted for a group
that's typically listed under J. All bets off if you've got a Japanese
artist. You see the problem.

G

[David Eppstein]

In article <150120032036189542%n...@spam.invalid>,

Keeper of the Purple Twilight <n...@spam.invalid> wrote:

> > Not really, because iTunes doesn't really have any idea whether the
> > name it's seeing is something that _should_ be sorted by anything other
> > than a simple lexical compare. Van Halen _is_ a last name, albeit in
> > two parts, that should go under V. Van Morrison is a person who should
> > be under M.
>

> Same thing for Ricky Van Shelton, who should be under S (Van is his
> middle name). :)

I list the artists as "Van Halen, Eddie" for exactly this reason
(well, I would if I had any Van Halen).

In my programs Gene and BibGene (which really really need me to spend
some time making them run under OS X) you could type the names either
way and it would usually figure it out anyway. But for names with
multiple parts, like Eddie, you could specify that the two parts should
be tied together by using a non-breaking space:
Eddie<space>Van<option-space>Halen.

--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epps...@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/

[peter]

David Eppstein <epps...@ics.uci.edu> wrote:

: I list the artists as "Van Halen, Eddie" for exactly this reason

: (well, I would if I had any Van Halen).

and that is the American way of sorting names, since van Halen is
originally a Dutch name and in Dutch it would be sorted under H :-)
--
Peter

[David Eppstein]

In article <b06b3l$i5dg$1...@simian.nlr.nl>, "peter" <non...@nospamm.nl>
wrote:

Right, but this particular Van Halen is American. When I'm doing
bibliographies with Dutch authors in them I try to use the Dutch
alphabetization convention.

[Jim Chokey]

> Not really, because iTunes doesn't really have any idea whether the
> name it's seeing is something that _should_ be sorted by anything other
> than a simple lexical compare. Van Halen _is_ a last name, albeit in
> two parts, that should go under V. Van Morrison is a person who should
> be under M. Jethro Tull is a person whose name was adopted for a group
> that's typically listed under J. All bets off if you've got a Japanese
> artist. You see the problem.

Yeah... I suspected as much. Still, I figured it never hurts to ask.
Thanks!

-- Jim C.