Kodi Community Forum

I recently acquired a huge collection of music and I've notice that a lot of the artists are duplicated because sometimes they'll have The preceding their name. For example, "Beatles" and "The Beatles" are considered two different bands by XBMC.

I know the real solution is just to fix all my ID3 tags, and I have been going through them to fix misspellings and other things that caused duplicate artists but I missed alot of the the's because the media library for winamp ignores it and considers them the same artist.... that's what got me thinking it would be a nice feature for XBMC as well.

Not gonna happen. Ignore "The" is only for sorting order. If you tag them differently, they will be different artists in Xbmc. Xbmc should not assume anything about your tags. Assumptions are bad. Just correct your tags.

It is the standard of almost all media centric applications to ignore "The, " form the Artists name and in some even for the Album name, thus XMBC should have that option I believe.

We ignore it during a sort, which IMO is good enough. The only way to do it well in the database would be to truncate "The " off artists when they're found (ie you'll never see the "The " if an artist appears as both). This means altering metadata which IMO is something we shouldn't do.