I have several Simon & Garfunkel CDs. Some of them are listed in MB as the artist “Simon & Garfunkel” and some are listed with “Simon and Garfunkel”. This causes the problem that I end up with albums grouped under two artists in my collection. I want to avoid that!
It seems to be generally agreed that the official name is “Simon & Garfunkel” . Their official website consistently uses & instead of “and”.
Some of the album covers have the “and” instead of &, so if we assume that this is correct, how can I set the Album Artist Sort Order to be “Simon&Garfunkel” in these cases? Is it possible?
You want to tick “Use standardised artist names” in the options, that’ll ignore the artist credit and use the name from the artist entity (“Simon & Garfunkel” in this case). I don’t think the sort order would be affected either way, there’s none associated with artist credits.
Standardized means the primary name of the artist, as it appears on the artist’s own entry - so with the ampersand in this case. The variant releases use “as credited”:
Personally, I consider “&” vs “and” to be at the level of typography, so I don’t feel any need to preserve it, just as we don’t preserve non-standard capitalization unless there is clear evidence of artist intent. So in my opinion it would be fine to change releases credited as “Simon and Garfunkel” to use the ampersand. (But that’s not explicit in the guidelines.)
All this stuff is a huge mess. For Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, I count 15 releases with “&” in the artist credit and 5 with “and”. All of the front covers that I looked at use “and”, but some (but not all) of the CD spines use “&”.
The releases I showed are consistent with their associated artwork. I don’t know if you can consider this artist intent, but if you do, it’s inconsistent.
Yup. Simon and Garfunkel’s releases are a huge mess - including the track credits. It is particularly surprising as Art Garfunkel as an aspiring architect prided himself on precision.
The sort name is the one associated with the artist on MusicBrainz. If you always want to show then with an ampersand (&) rather than “and”, they you could set this with a tagging script like:
$if($in(%artistsort%, and ),$set(artistsort,$replace(%artistsort%, and , & )))
$if($in(%albumartistsort%, and ),$set(albumartistsort,$replace(%albumartistsort%, and , & )))
EDIT: I just re-read your note, and I think I had it backwards. If you want all occurrences of ampersand changed to “and”, the script would be:
Thanks, but…there’s a similar problem with artwork for releases that show “The Rolling Stones” and “Rolling Stones”…so a text substitution script doesn’t really scale…
The sort name should be the same, regardless of whether the credits show as “Rolling Stones” or “The Rolling Stones”. I’m obviosly not understanding your issue.
If you want releases that have an artist name “Rolling Stones” to have a sort name of “Rolling Stones” and releases with the artist name “The Rolling Stones” to have the sort name “Rolling Stones, The”, then (with the Use standardized artist name option unchecked) a script like the following should do what you want:
Well, again, this is just my opinion, but in other areas we distinguish (or try to) “artist intent” vs “graphic designer intent”. If cover art on one release reads “simon & garfunkel” we would standardize the capitalization, so I don’t see a reason to not standardize & vs and.
There could be variations due to being released in different countries, etc. I personally think we should just always show what’s on the artwork with the exception of capitalization, which should follow guidelines. I totally disagree with standardizing And to & or Versus to vs. or whatever. We used to do that with featuring to feat. but that was changed to show what is on the release, so I don’t see why this would be any different.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. This is what I meant - on a per release basis. Currently, this is not true for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. I’ve submitted some edits to fix this.
