I want all my Movies and Music to Sort without “The” or “A”, but can’t find any way to do it other than manually editing every existing title, which is ridiculous.
Is there a global setting I can apply?
I tried Update from Core, but there is no Sort Title field in the update list, and the Sort Title is still a copy of the main Title that begins with “The”.
I’ve tried a couple things on my side in your movie database. I think I got all the A and THE movies, and fixed them for you.
Can you check and confirm for MOVIE?
For Music I’ve also fixed all Titles starting with The and A (I did this manually, there were only like 40, so I just found them, hit edit, removed “the”, hit next, rinse/repeat, about 2 minutes work).
As for your ideas I do agree:
You are right, Sort Title could be a good one to have in Update from Core for replacing.
Putting it on the ideas list.
Note: Right now the Sort Title ALSO gets updated/replaced but ONLY if your title field is different then what we have in Core, so that is not very useful.
There is no tool to "just automatically generate sort titles for all movies to not use “The” - Also good idea.
Important: But I want to take a step back, because if I look at your movie “The Birdcage” - that is in Core with the right Sort Title, it also has “The Birdcage” as title and “Birdcage” as sort title.
Thanks for your efforts! 
I’m happy to have provided ideas for development.
Regarding some titles with Sort Title already edited, I started editing “The” titles manually in alphabetical sequence up to about C, and then realised how many there were still to do. So The Birdcage for example was in that group of edits.
Hm that is strange, because The Birdcage still had “The Birdcage” as sortname - I fixed that one as well yesterday.
What I did was click the “T” button in the alphabet bar, then scrolled to “The” and fixed them from there on!
Anyway, I’ve taken note of the ideas here 
That’s really useful to know; I was just hitting that situation with getting the Web Books app up to date!
I’ve hit this with one book:
If I clear the Sort Title and save, I get this:
If I update from Core, it still shows the Sort Title as above. So is this expected behaviour?
(I notice that if I change the Title and change the Title in the Update from Core to ‘Replace’ rather than ‘Update’, then update from Core, it changes the Title, but not the Sort Title.)
For Book we are currently not delivering a sort title for books, we see most users group by AUTHOR, and then sort by “RELEASE DATE”.
Strangely enough, title sorting is not a huge thing. We do have it on our list to perhaps deliver sort titles for books too.
(we do deliver sort names for authors, of course).
Huh. I’m surprised it’s a little requested feature.
No worries, anyway! It’s not a big issue.
Forgot to answer your question:
Clearing the sort title, then saving will fill in (sort of ghost entry) the regular title, in the sort title field, that is intentional, yes.
