[akoster]

Ignored was probably a poor choice of word. Special characters will be converted to their standard English character equivalent if possible.   So Sinéad O'Connor would become Sinead O' Conner. Having said that, I just realized that I converted the special characters of the song fields before doing comparisons, but I did not convert the special characters of the text in the search field.  So I would not be surprised if I now made it impossible to search using special characters.

According to the National Information Standards Organization, you are handling these correctly by converting to the standard English character for sorting and searching.
http://www.niso.org/publications/tr/tr03.pdf

What would be nice is if you were to also follow their recommendation for ignoring punctuation (defined as follows):

The following punctuation marks should be disregarded for arrangement purposes:
period (full stop), comma, semi-colon, colon, parentheses, square brackets, angle
brackets, braces (curved brackets), apostrophe, quotation marks (single or double), exclamation
mark, question mark. They are not to be treated as spaces.

As an example, currently these two songs sort in this order
 Jesus Shall Reign
 Jesus, Draw Me Ever Nearer

Proper Library sort order would have them in the opposite order, ignoring the comma in the title.