Bugzilla – Bug 4020
Request a way to tag albums and artists to get sorted first
Last modified: 2006-10-03 14:33:01 UTC
In previous SlimServers (6.3 etc.) the Artist (and Album) menu was presented in this order: 0..9 A..Z [ with the bracket character at the end of the menu. In 6.5b1 the order is 0..9 [ A..Z with the bracket in the middle. I realize this is relatively unimportant for 99% of people, but I use the '[' as an initial tag character to sort stuff off to its own location. Anyway the behavior is variant from earlier releases, which might or might not be intentional, and I'd prefer the old behavior. Presumably other odd characters ([ \ ] ^ _ ') are now being sorted to the middle as well. Possibly the sort during which the menu is created is now being performed with the assumption that the menu characters are in lower case, which would put them after the bracket, rather than before.
I don't know how well the sorting behavior is defined. There might be a good reason why it was changed. Dan?
I'm sorry to bring this up again, but. . . this has actually gotten worse (for me) -- slimserver is now sorting albums/artists that start with '[' like this: artist1 [artist2 artist3 [artist4 in other words, ignoring the leading '['. I don't know about for other people, but this is very bad for me. All the things that I painstakingly prefixed with '[' so that they would sort into their own area are now coming up within everything else. Please restore the previous behavior, which was itself variant from the original behavior, but at least easier for me to deal with. I realize it's not a significant bug, but this is now the second time the behavior has changed in this release vs. 6.3, which seems odd. Please don't make me retag thousands of files!
Matt: just to be clear, you _want_ the [ symbol to sort after alphanumeric characters? It sounds like we have some inconsistent behavior here, where sometimes the [ is ignored and sometimes it's sorted. My first reaction would be to have punctuation be ignored for the purposes of sorting (unless the title is ONLY punctuation). A little information about how you'd like it to work and why would help us fix it once and for all the best way possible.
Certainly this is a thing particular to me, but in order to get a large number of files (old-time radio) to sort separately from music files in the SlimServer menus, I have prefixed all of their tags with a leading '[', because in the old SlimServer that sorted them to the end of the list. It's a kludge, and I know that. It was nice, though, to have them all sort after the music files. If you want to have the sort skip punctuation (and I understand the reason for that), I would have the logic be, rather than "skip any punctuation unless the tag is _all_ punctuation," something like If (tag starts with paired punctuation mark (left paren or left bracket)) skip to first non-blank character after its mate, then sort by that Else If (tag is all punctuation) or (tag starts with unpaired left punctuation mark) sort by tag as written. Else skip leading punctuation and whitespace, sort from there. That way something like (Please Don't Let Me Be) Misunderstood would sort by 'Misunderstood', while [Bickersons 1946-06-02 and [*(#$& would sort by '[', and ***Ice Me would sort by "Ice". An unpaired left punctuation mark, in other words, should be treated as intentionally unpaired, and as meaning something different from other leading punctuation. That would preserve what I want while handling all the other cases . . . I think. Just to head off something . . . I realize that in order to find my old-time radio files I could tag and sort by "Genre", but that would not prevent them from showing up in the main album and artist menus, which is what I am trying to avoid. Thanks for listening.
(In reply to comment #2) > I'm sorry to bring this up again, but. . . this has actually gotten worse (for > me) -- slimserver is now sorting albums/artists that start with '[' > like this: > artist1 > [artist2 > artist3 > [artist4 > in other words, ignoring the leading '['. This is a result of change 9443 made for bug 4057. Square bracket are now stripped, just like many other punctuation/special characters. If you don't throw out the '[' then it's impossible to search for 'artist2' when you've set Search Within Words to 'Search Beginning of Words'. See the following thread for the characters that are stripped from strings for sorting and searching purposes: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=26441 You could change those square brackets to curly brackets or another character that isn't stripped. A good tagging program like Mp3tag would let you retag these files in a matter of minutes. How the particular character you choose is sorted in relation to the alphabet and numeric characters is going to depend on the collation of the database server. Perhaps that's why the behavior changed from 6.3 to 6.5, as the dbms was changed to MySQL.
Correction: change 9433.
Thanks Jim. I don't know what guarantee there is that the left curly brace will forever remain an unsorted character, but I'm willing to convert to that. I do use mp3tag, but I have no clue as to how one would do a mass search/replace with it -- I see no search/replace function -- and I have 14,000 files tagged as I described. I guess I'll see if I can reason it out, while hoping that the next release of SS doesn't start ignoring { also.
Created attachment 1578 [details] Mp3tag action group to replace square brackets with curly brackets Here's an Mp3tag Action group that will replace [ and ] with { and } within the ARTIST tag. Place the file in the C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\Application Data\Mp3tag\data\actions folder. You execute it by selecting some or all files in Mp3tag and then pressing the Aa button (or ALT+5). Check off the action named "Replace Square Brackets" then press "OK". Load up a handful of files and test it out first. If it works, then you can load up your whole library and execute it. Also, there's also a setting in Mp3tag that will preserve the file modification times, if you don't want your 'New Music' order changed. Find it under Tools > Options > Tags.
I said . . . >>I don't know what guarantee there is that the left curly brace will forever remain an unsorted character . . .<< (by which I guess I meant "a character which is not skipped during sorting", i.e. an unSKIPped character) and the answer is, no guarantee at all -- it is a skipped character NOW. I retagged all 14,000 files replacing [ with {, a process which took over two hours, rescanned my library which also took forver, and now in the artist list I have artist1 {artist2 artist3 {artist4 or in other words, exactly the same behavior as before. Is there any character that is not A..Z 0..9 that SlimServer WILL use as a sortable character? Or is this behavior (skipping the curly brace when sorting) not-as-designed? Curly braces are not listed as punctuation marks in the forum thread to which I was directed; apparently that is not the definitive statement of what counts as punctuation. In that thread it said: *** More of a minor bug. It depends on if you classify them as 'punctuation' The current list of chars to strip is: !*?,;=+<>#%&()"'$.\:- *** Well, apparently that list now includes the brackets and braces. Does it include the caret? Underscore? Reverse quote (Ascii 0x60)? The '@' sign? The tilde? I guess I'll change a few tags and rescan, and see what happens. Sorry to drag this on so long . . . I really thought it would be easier than this.
Well, for anyone who's still following this . . . I tagged one file each so that its artist started with underscore, caret, at symbol, and tilde. SlimServer apparently ignores all of them when sorting. The artist is listed in my directory as the version starting with the at symbol (which was the first one I used), and all of the other mp3s were placed under that artist. So, there no longer seems to be any way at all to prefix with a special symbol and get things sorted off by themselves, which I think is a shame. I think that losing that capability, kludgy though it may be, is a bigger loss than that an incredibly unlikely artist name like ~MCFat or @Britney not sort into the Ms or Bs. Perhaps you guys could consider selecting one punctuation mark, such as tilde, and leaving it unskipped over.
00-..., AA-...
I've turned this into a feature request and changed the Summary line. The old summary was: "'[' is placed between '9' and 'A' in Artists, Albums menus" I do feel bad that we've removed this accidental feature that you were using, but we fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of functionality in the 6.5.0 release, and it was a casualty of that other work. Perhaps KDF's suggestion of prefixing your tags with 00- or AA- will work for you. Regardless we'll revisit this when we do more work in this area in the future.
RE: The "request" for a way to force the sort order. We already have ARTISTSORT and ALBUMSORT. Aren't these tags a means of doing exactly that? These tags let you sort albums and artists using strings independant of ALBUM and ARTIST tags. There's nothing that says their contents even need to resemble the original. Combined with KDF's suggestion you could have, for instance: ARTIST=Green Day ARTISTSORT=ZZZ Green Day or ALBUM=Best of the Bee Gees ALBUMSORT=ZZZ Best of the Bee Gees The point being that you can throw _anything_ into these tags that forces them to sort to the beginning or end of your album and artist lists. Because the strings won't be displayed in the web or remote interfaces, there's no reason to be limited to something that is also nicely formatted or even readable.
Jim is correct. Please use the tags that are designed for doing exactly what you want. For ID3 (v2.3+): 'TSOA' => 'Album sort order', 'TSOP' => 'Performer sort order', 'TSOT' => 'Title sort order', For FLAC, Ogg and other free-form tagging systems: ARTISTSORT=Foo ALBUMSORT=Bar etc.