All tracks: Sort by file path or Sort by Artist (alphabetically) - Album (Year) - Track No. Without breaking albums apart

[Alphyn]

I see quite a lot of feature requests here regarding sorting, so I decided to make another one. 

Currently, there's no good way to sort the "All tracks" list. Most of the sorting options like filename or track number make absolutely no sense for this list. Sorting by Author breaks the albums apart (it creates a mess if an album has several authors) it shuffles tracks within albums. I think currently sorting the All tracks list by author is unusable. The only somewhat usable sorting method for this list is by album. The albums are then sorted alpabetically, different authors are mixed. I think most people would like their albums sorted by author and year.

I think the simplest solution for this problem would be adding sorting by file path. I think most people have their albums organized in folders by author and album folders can be renamed to include the release year. So the folder structure looks like this:

Author 1

- 1999 - Album 1

- 2002 - Album 2

Author 2 

- 1996 - Album 1

- 2000 - Album 2

If if was possible to load the music library into Poweramp and preserve this organization, It would be super nice! Thanks!

[blaubär]

53 minutes ago, Alphyn said:

I think currently sorting the All tracks list by author is unusable. The only somewhat usable sorting method for this list is by album. The albums are then sorted alpabetically, different authors are mixed.

Did you try Settings > Library > Lists > Album Artist Label for Albums and then sort by Artist ? That should sort by Album Artist which might give better results. Provided the Album Artist is properly maintained. If not, then Join Albums could keep up the sort by Artist.

EDIT: but you are right, even if you can solve the problem with the different artists it still is sorted by Artist and then alphabetically.

So it would seem the use case for all songs would be to shuffle ALL songs, some people want that.

[andrewilley]

The whole point of the All Songs list is that it is a list of all songs in the library, not by artists or albums per se.

If you want to see everything by artist/album/folderpath/etc. just use one of those other categories. You will still have all songs available, but with more control over how you see them. 

Andre

[Alphyn]

On 3/10/2019 at 2:43 AM, andrewilley said:

The whole point of the All Songs list is that it is a list of all songs in the library, not by artists or albums per se.

What's the purpose of that list at all if there's no good way of sorting the songs in it? It might as well show all the songs in random order, which it actually does in most sorting modes.

[andrewilley]

50 minutes ago, Alphyn said:

What's the purpose of that list at all if there's no good way of sorting the songs in it?

You can still sort the All Songs flat list in lots of ways (such as alphabetically by title, filename, artist, album names, etc) using the Menu > List Options feature in that list. Title makes the most sense to me, as things like Track # are meaningless in a large flat list. The ordering can be set at one layer only though (as I said, it's a flat list) so if you sort by Artist for example then the songs within that artist are only sorted alphabetically. To get two-level sorting control you'd need to switch to Artists, Albums, etc views. 

Andre

[Alphyn]

I solved the issue by downloading AIMP. It's not as cool and feature rich as Poweramp, but the simple and elegant library management it offers works much better for me than Poweramp's clumsy monstrosity.

I'm sorry if I sound like an entitled asshole but i'm frustrated to see that the most advanced and nearly perfect Android music player has an overcomplicated and ultimately disfunctional playlist management.