Maybe I'm a little compulsive, but I like to have file personal names by last name, i.e. Eric Clapton under C.  This would be an issue in the collection browser and in the file renaming support, among other places. Is there any support for this in Amarok?  I don't really want to rename everything to "Clapton, Eric", because this causes problems  for e.g. musicbrainz.  If no support exists, perhaps a feature request could be to mark an artist name as a person  (or maybe even make this the default).

I think this would be a great feature.  It would be a bit difficult for Amarok to guess what is an "Artist Name" vs "Group Name", but perhaps a "Sort As" tag could be added.  Then users who want to use this feature could enter that information in.  If no "Sort As" tag is found, have it default to "Artist".  I definitely miss this feature from Helium Music Manager.  It's not a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice.

I've previously added this functionality to my own copy of Webplay. I wouldn't say it was the best way to do it, and I wouldn't know where to start with putting the code into Amarok anyway. Not yet.

But, the way I did is was:
Split the artist name into multiple artists on the words "and", "&", "with", "featuring", "ft", "feat." or "/" (so "Tom Jones Featuring The Stereophonics" becomes two artists: "Tom Jones" and "The Stereophonics").
Then, for each artist, if there is a comma in their name, swap the two sides around (So "Jones, Tom" becomes "Tom Jones", and "Bangles, The" becomes "The Bangles").
Then, if the artist starts with "A" or "The", swap this to the end (so "The Bangles" go back to being "Bangles, The").
Otherwise, if the artist consists of two words, and the first word is in the list of known first names, swap it to the end. (So "Tom" is recognised, and we go back to "Jones, Tom", but "Culture" isn't, so it stays as "Culture Club".

Since I was hacking it together, I hard-coded my list for known first names. Ideally, the conjunctions and the first names would both be configurable (and some default values supplied). Even then, you need another exception list, so that band names which loke like real names don't get disturbed ("Helen Love", "Del Amitri" and "Van Halen" being the examples I've got recorded).

After all this, you rejoin the artist names using the original conjuctions, and you've got a canonical version for sorting purposes.
So "The Bangles" sort under "Bangles, The", and "Tom Jones and The Stereophonics" sort under "Jones, Tom and Stereophonics, The".

I also keep my collection organized this way; last name, first name;  within the directory structure and the Amarok collection. I have seen other music applications utilize a separate artist database, such that the artist could be displayed as either firstname lastname, or lastname, firstname, depending on the user's selection in preferences. One such app is Albumplayer. I know this is a windows app, but it does have a good artist database implementation.

Is this feature a possibility for the 2.0 release?

I would like to see a Sort as... item in the context menu for the collection. The sort-name style guidelines at MusicBrainz are quite good. I would much prefer to be able to do this manually rather than have a script **** it up for me. This means I can have 'Johann Sebastian Bach' sorted as 'Bach, Johann Sebastian', 'Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович' sorted as 'Shostakovich, Dmitriy Dmitriyevich', 'أم كلثوم' sorted as 'Umm Kalthoum' and '坂本龍' as 'Sakamoto Ryuichi'. Unless there are hackers out there who are great linguists, I don't think a script could adequately do this.

Actually, I've just noticed that most of music has the musicbrainz_sortname tag already. Can that be used to sort the collection without actually displaying the content of the tag of course?