Having trouble with All Artist Songs sorting

[roseyhead]

I like to listen to music by putting all of a band's albums on in release order. The way I'd expect to do this is Artists > choose one > All Artist Songs, sorted by Year. (sorting by Album puts them in alphabetical order) This was working until yesterday but all of a sudden my songs are out of order. It puts a couple of songs from the beginning of the album at the end. I've attached a couple of screenshots demonstrating.

The only change I've made that could possibly have had an impact is installing a few other music players. I'm trying out a new launcher, new Twitter app etc. and thought it's a good time to try a new music player. As it turns out Poweramp is the one I like the most so I've since uninstalled the rest but now I can't listen to my music the way I used to which is a real deal breaker. I've tried clearing my system media cache, cleared Poweramp's data, uninstalled it, just about everything I can think of. Is there something I'm missing here?

Edit: I've looked at a few others and it seems totally random. Some artists with four albums show all their tracks in the right order while some artists with one album are out of order (unless I sort by track # or filename, of course)

 

Edit again: on further inspection I'm pretty confident sorting by Year is actually sorting by Date Added. Swapping between the two results in identical track order. Why this is happening or how I can fix it though I have no idea.

[andrewilley]

The 'Date Added' sort order can work in two ways (controlled via Settings > Folders and Library > Lists > Sort By Filesystem Date/Time):

1. The original date that the song was first scanned and imported into Poweramp's library (this will get updated should you do a full Rescan, or rename/move a song file, or add a new song file from your PC, etc).
2. The 'last modified' date that would be the time shown in the device's filesystem using a File Explorer app. This will get changed every time the physical file is modified in any way (e.g. edited to change a tag, or add cover art), but NOT by simply copying the file to a new location or transferring an existing file from your PC to your mobile device.

It would take quite a bit of work to get either of the above modes to reflect the year that an existing song was released though, unless you use a batch program to 'touch' the properties of your files and fake the last-modified date to show the year of the song's release. But as soon as you edit a file in any way (or another app does so) its date would get updated to today.

'By Year' sorting is based on the data contents of the ID3 tag that is embedded within each song file, and it's worth checking that those tags are all correct for the songs that are getting mis-sorted (long press on them in PA and select Info/Tags). A batch tag editor would be the easiest way to update these if you find a lot of errors, or you can change individual ones in PA.  

Andre

[roseyhead]

Thanks for the reply. Just to clear up the confusion, sorting by Date Added is working as expected, sorting by Year not so much. I'd expect this to sort by Year as specified by the ID3 tag, then sort by track number or something. The issue here is that it seems to be sorting by Date Added when I've selected Year as the sorting method. I semi-confirmed this by removing this artist from my phone and copying it back, one file at a time in the correct order. They're still showing up the same way in both Year and Date Added but now they're listed in the right order. Does that all make sense? Another artist I've left alone is still out of order. The ID3 tags are all correct.

[andrewilley]

I don't know how it would sub-sort stuff within the same Year as there isn't another lower sorting level, either alphabetically or simply by the physical order they are read off the file system.

Andre

[roseyhead]

I guess that makes sense, thanks. Maybe one of the other music apps I installed touched some of the files and put them out of order on me. It won't be difficult to pull them all off and resync them.