Ability to ignore quotation/quote marks, parentheses, and other punctuation and symbols in artist names and song/album titles?

[MHoobin]

Hi there, this is my first time posting here! I've been using the paid Poweramp app as my primary method of listening to music for a few months now, and I'm quite happy with it. However, I've noticed that, when sorting items alphabetically in the app, artist names and song/album titles that begin with quotes/quotation marks, parentheses, and other punctuation and symbols are sorted at the beginning of alphabetical lists. As you can see in the attached screenshots from my phone, songs and albums whose titles begin as such are placed almost at the very beginning of the alphabetical list of all my songs. So the order ends up like this:

• Titles that start with exclamation points (i.e. "!!!!!!!" by Billie Eilish)
• Titles that start with double quotation marks (i.e. ""Heroes"" by David Bowie)
• Titles that start with pound/number signs (i.e. "#9 Dream" by John Lennon)
• Titles that start with dollar signs (i.e. "$15 Draw" by Ringo Starr)
• Titles that start with ampersands (i.e. "&" by Tally Hall)
• Titles that start with single quotation marks (i.e. "'39" by Queen)
• Titles that start with parentheses (i.e. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult)
• Titles that start with ellipses (i.e. ...And Justice for All by Metallica)
• And finally, songs that start with numbers, followed by songs that start with A, B, C, D, etc.

Additional notes: titles that start with inverted exclamation marks are grouped at the very end of alphabetical lists (the three Green Day albums ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! come after the letter "Z"). I don't have any titles that start with question marks (either regular ones or inverted ones), so I'm not sure where they would be placed.

Now, of the above examples, I have no particular issue with the placement of songs like "!!!!!!!" or "&". I would expect song titles that are entirely symbols to be sorted before songs titles that start with numbers or letters. However, I find the placement of songs like "'Heroes'" and "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" inconvenient and just not to my liking. Equally as frustrating is that the same thing happens to artist names—but the only artist I have whose name starts with punctuation is "Weird Al" Yankovic, so he's stuck in his own world at the very top of all my artists rather than being listed under "W"!

My request is for the addition of several options that would allow the app to ignore double and single quotation marks, parentheses, pound/number signs/hashtags, and currency symbols. Similar to the feature that already exists where users can choose to have the app acknowledge or ignore articles like "the, "a", or "an" at the beginning of artist names or song/album titles, users could customize how they would like each form of punctuation or symbols to be sorted. So, along with the "Don't Ignore Articles For Sort" option that's already present, we could have "Ignore Double Quotation Marks", "Ignore Single Quotation Marks", "Ignore Parentheses", "Ignore Pound/Number Signs", "Ignore Currency Symbols", and perhaps even "Ignore Inverted Question and Exclamation Marks".

That way, "'Heroes'" could be listed under "H", "#9 Dream" could be listed under "9", "$15 Draw" could be listed under "15", "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" could be listed under "D", and "Weird Al" Yankovic could be listed under "W". Thank you for your consideration.

[andrewilley]

This has already been brought up in the past. Max's suggestion was to use an expanded 'Ignore Article' feature to add user-defined wording. This is planned to allow users to define regional article wording (e.g. Le, La, Les) but it could also allow including ", !, (, etc. I'm not sure sure that would work very well though, as it would require a space delimiter. See my comment in this thread:

I agree with you that a simple option to just ignore any punctuation marks from the start of alpha-sorted tags would be better - although I think just the one item is needed, not a separate control for every punctuation mark. Another handy feature would be a tickbox to apply smart (human) sorting to multi-digit numeric content in tags - so "11" comes after "2" (which it doesn't in pure ASCII sorting). 

As with ignoring Articles though, these should not be applied when sorting paths or filenames, which should always be properly ASCII sorted.

Andre

[MHoobin]

@andrewilley Ah okay, my apologies. Thank you for linking that thread to me, I see what you mean about delimiter spaces for words like "The", "A", and "An"—I had forgotten that song titles beginning with "The" are listed under "T" too!

[andrewilley]

Sometimes these sort of relatively small changes hang around on the "to do" list for a while, and get actioned as a batch next time Max is working on that area of code.

Andre