Help with sort order logic
Answered
I set up a Node 2i today. Very happy with the playback but very confused by some controller issues:
What is the logic for ordering the display of individual tracks? Folders display in the usual logical alphabetical order by filename. Track display within folders appears, in some cases, close to random - not alphabetized by filename, not alphabetized by artist or title either.
Thanks for any help.
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Official comment
Hi Keith
The sort order is the disc number then track number according to the metadata of the files as it should be.
Sounds like you may have metadata issues; https://support1.bluesound.com/hc/en-us/articles/200271906
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Hi Tony,
Thanks for the reply. However, that is most certainly NOT the way it should be - this is bad sorting logic, not an issue with the metadata on my end. This logic only makes sense if each folder contains one album and only one album. But it shouldn't be assumed that everybody organizes their music that way, which actually defeats the purpose of the flexibility that digital music gives you. If, for example, you organize your music collection in folders with mixes of tracks (like "Classic rock" or "80s music"), you most certainly do NOT want those displayed in a sequence that lists all of the track 1s, then all of the track 2s, etc. Most people expect to see those alphabetized by artist or song title, which is the way they would be displayed when you open the folder in Windows.
Can this be addressed in a future update to the app? A simple option like "Sort by: filename, artist, title, track number" would be ideal and ought to be easy to implement.
Unfortunately the current logic makes the system close to unusable for me.
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Hello Keith,
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. I will pass this along to our quality assurance team to see if we can provide some more robust sorting options in a future firmware update.Regards,
Wesley P.0 -
Thanks for considering a way to address this.
In the meanwhile, I am trying to play around with my metadata for a kludge fix to the problem and am hoping you can provide a little bit more detail on the current logic.
Kludge #1 (for mix folders like the aforementioned "classic rock" folder) - I just deleted all the disc # and track # metadata. This resulted in the folder contents being alphabetized by song title (which works perfect for me, although some people might prefer alphabetization by artist and then by song title).
Kludge #2 (for folders where I keep everything by a single artist - e.g., "Beatles," "Led Zeppelin") - I use a system filename convention that keeps everything in both the correct album sequence and chronological order by year. So, for example, in the Zep folder, the system filenames are:
1969 - Led Zeppelin I - 1. Good Times Bad Times.flac
1969 - Led Zeppelin I - 2. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You.flac
...
1969 - Led Zeppelin II - 1. Whole Lotta Love.flac
...
etc.
So, when I am viewing these in Windows or opening them in Foobar on my PC, the entire discography shows up in correct order.
The current logic for the BluOS, as noted, goes by track, so instead of going in order, first we get the track 1s from every album, then the track 2s from every album, etc.
My kludge fix was to attempt to use the disc # metadata to get everything back in chronological order. So, I made all the tracks on LZ1 disc #1, all the tracks on LZ2 disc #2, etc. If the sort order logic is to sort first by disc # and then by track #, then this SHOULD have resulted in everything getting back in perfect chronological order again.
The result, however, seems to have done that PARTIALLY with the remainder being randomly over the map based on criteria I can't figure out. The Zeppelin folder is mostly correct except for the contents of disc #1 inexplicably being the last in the list instead of the first. A Peter Gabriel folder is ignoring - but only partially - the disc # metadata and displaying four albums' worth of track 1s followed by four albums' worth of track 2s, 3s, 4s, etc., before eventually starting to sort by disc # with disc #5 and getting the remainder of the chronology correct. A Cowboy Junkies folder, even more perplexingly, displays about 20 tracks in what appears to be a completely random order before eventually getting the rest correct and displaying them in sequence. I have triple-checked the metadata, and the disc #s and track #s are all what they should be.
So, are there any other variables factored in the sorting logic that I need to be aware of? OR is there a possibility that this is not an issue with the sort order logic but the indexing function - not all of my metadata changes getting recorded when I re-index?
Thanks in advance for any further insight.
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Hi Keith
If you are browsing by "Folders" a mix of file types could be part of your "issue":
If you have wma, mp3, flac, alac, etc. in the same folder the wma, m4a will be sorted first. All files are alphabetized by track title regardless of the filename.
A "compromise" and make folders based on year\album could be a "solution" for you. Using Mp3Tag that could be done in a "few" seconds.
Convert: Tag - Filename: %Year% - %Album%\$num(%track%,2). %Title%
Mp3Tag will make the folders and move your files like this:x:\..\1969 - Led Zeppelin I\01. Good times bad times.*
.
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x:\...\1969 - Led Zeppelin II\01. Whole lotta love.*Browsing by "Albums" and sort by "Artist - Release Date" could also be an alternative. (Not working in Windows controller at the moment)
If you change metadata, cover art or move files you have to do a "Rebuild" and not "Reindex"
Help - Diagnostics - Rebuild Index for the changes to be visible.0 -
Hi, I just installed a Node and was shocked at the seemingly random listing of songs I have in a single folder of about 500 of my favorite songs. Are you saying there is no way to sort these by titles?
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They don't seem to have addressed this problem since I raised it two years ago. (And I can't believe it took two years for someone else to raise it!)
The only solution is a kludge. If you blank out all track # and disc # metadata, then rebuild your index, the folder will start sorting alphabetically by track title. There is no way to tell it to sort differently and no way to get it to sort alphabetically *without* deleting the track # and disc # metadata. Otherwise it will sort all folder contents by disc and track number.
In folders where I have multiple albums from the same artist I've gotten them to sort chronologically and in proper track order by using the disc # metadata field to indicate the sequence of releases rather than actual disc #s.
It took me months to play around with the metadata across thousands of files to get them to display right. All that could have been avoided if there were a simple box to check to get every folder to sort by filename instead of by embedded metadata.
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I was thinking about all the digital music services I use: Windows OS, KEF LS Wireless, Spotify, my previous music streamer I just replaced due to old age, Slim Devices, my FiiO portable Music player, my default music player in my Motorola Android phone, my old Sansa MP3 player, foobar 2000, and Winamp. None of them sort my music like the BlueOS does, not one of them. So Keith, maybe we are missing something and to everyone else this is normal, but I don't see how.
For the one specific folder I referenced that has songs from 100's of different albums, I found mp3Tag allowed me to set the disk number to 1 on all the songs with only a couple of clicks. And then, under 'Tools' it has a Re-numbering wizard that automatically changed the track number from 1 to the number of tracks in that folder. Easy peasy. Of course, if add songs, I'll have to re-number every time.
However, I don't need to do that with all those other devices/programs/apps. Good apps adapt to the way you work. Bad apps force you to work like the developer thinks.
My wife likes a web page to scroll one direction when she slides on the trackpad, I like it to scroll the other direction. Windows allows me to choose. Some like their maps with North at the top, others want their current direction to be at the top. Map programs allow me to choose. The list goes on how apps allow you to display data that makes sense to you. BlueOS currently does not do it for me.
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Exactly. It amazes me the time and resources that have gone into developing digital music interfaces, and a good 20 years into this tech, there isn't a single one that's more user-friendly than just opening up your folders on Windows and clicking on what you want to play. Of course one of the reasons that's so easy is that Windows sorts the folder however you want, and for my purposes I use a filename format that puts everything in the right order when the folder is alphabetized and I can't think of any good reason this shouldn't be portable to any other app whose main function is listing the contents of a file folder. But, ok, maybe I'm the only one and everyone else is doing something different. A configurable sort order isn't too much to ask for, either.
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