[jazzman4342*]

I am new to MS with tons of questions.

I noticed when I downloaded my .pdf file list of songs to a "collection" any song title with "A" as the first and only letter i.e. "A Fool I Know", does not get sorted into the "A" alphabet section.  Rather it puts the song in the "F" section. I have also tried setting the sort to "use file name" with no success. Is this a bug or is there a setting somewhere?  If so, where?  Thanks.

[Zubersoft]

By default, MobileSheets ignores articles while sorting such as "A", "An" and "The". If you don't like this, go to Settings->Library Settings and uncheck the option to "Ignore Articles While Sorting".

Mike

[BRX]

There are still some occurrences in which MSP doesn't sort properly. I posted about it once already.

There's a problem when the beginning of the title is not an article but indeed a letter or another word.

Say somebody wants to use the title "A Train" (for Take the "A" Train. I've seen it written this way in a fake book), or just the title "A B C" (as the first letters of the alphabet) and best of all "Les" (not the french article, but the first name/abbreviation for Lester).

In all these cases it should be sorted under A or L respectively. It doesn't if the ignoring option is used. Very peculiar is the result for "Les" because MSP doesn't know where to sort it and makes some weird additional entries in the letter bar on the right (remember?).

My suggestion is to allow to add some character that usually isn't use in the titles (like ~ for instance) in the title metadata field like "A~ Train", "A~ B C" and "Les~" as indication that these aren't articles and are to be sorted normally. Of course it shouldn't be displayed in the other windows.

Wouldn't this be a way to sort out this sorting stuff? It could also be used if one wants explicit exceptions from the ignoring for certain titles or something like "A Feliciade" and other stuff.

[Zubersoft]

That's exactly what the custom sort title is for. By default, that field is hidden. You can enable it in the song editor by tapping on Configure Fields, and then check the box for the custom sort title. If you entered "A Train" in the custom sort title, it would put it in the "A" section regardless of any other sorting rules. I don't really want to make the sorting stuff any more complicated than it already is by having special characters that I have to process to conditionally ignore sections of the title (and to strip that out while displaying the song title everywhere).

I don't recall having any issues with sorting or alphabet letters when there is a song that starts with "Les" and "Les" is one of the articles to ignore. I'll test this out again, but at least with the language set to English, it wasn't an issue for me.

Mike

Update: I just verified that ignoring "Les" with a song starting with "Les" didn't cause any issues.

[BRX]

And I'll test out the custom title sort. I wasn't aware it could solve the mentioned problems. Would be great especially for the "Les problem" in the letter bar. If it works there there is no need to change anything.

But just to be sure. Did you test "Les" with normal title or custom title. As I said on my tablet it causes weird additional entries in the letter bar. I think I already sent you a screenshot of that.

[Zubersoft]

I tested with it in the normal title. If we are seeing different behavior, it could be due to different settings or a different language (if you aren't using English).

Mike

[BRX]

Thanks to your advice with the custom sort my letter bar problem is now "sorted". :-)

Because it was hidden I hadn't noticed and tried it before. It's still weird that I got those peculiar additional entries in the letter bar and you didn't. It wasn't just the "Les" thing, but some others too, when I had some invalid non-ASCII characters in the names of the titles (which I deleted or corrected). I'm using English as language in the program, too.

I hope one of the small requests between the big sync and annotations updates you are going to address is the csv import. And for that, could you add the custom sort title there as well? If I remember right, it isn't in there yet.

[itsme]

I removed all articles except "The" from "Articles to ignore" and left "Ignore Articles While Sorting" checked.
My song titles are precise enough that I only very rarely have to make use of "custom sort title".