Albums not sorting into track order

[Stuart Bruce]

I like to listen to albums in track order, and queue up a few albums for a long drive.

I'm now finding in Poweramp that even though I've got the Sort option for Album Songs set to "By track #", Poweramp still puts the tracks into a different order, then when I queue them up, they play in the order they're being listed, not in track number order.

The screengrabs show what I'm seeing. In the second grab you can see that the album is being sorted starting with track 6, then 5, then 7, then 8, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 1... and what I want is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 if possible.

Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing? Or might this be a bug where track number sorting isn't working?

I'm on build 945, on Android 12.

Any help welcome please?

[Fitzian]

Well the tracks are being sorted alphabetically by the looks of it.

What does into/tags show when selecting any of these files?

[Bencherished]

@Stuart Bruce as soon as I saw your comment, my mind ran to disc numbering, but became confused when @Fitzian pointed out that it was sorted alphabetically, I googled the album.

(In Sides is the fourth album by British electronic group Orbital, The album's title is a reference to the fact that the original vinyl LP release of the album was as a 3-LP vinyl box set, with one track per side of each disc).

This info lead me to suspect that the problem is with the tags. 

Use a third party app to edit the disc number tags/info, they should all be 1, right now they are 0 1 2 or 1 2 3.

Try it and see what happens. 

Bencherished 

[andrewilley]

I suspect it's disc tags that are causing this. Try enabling viewing of disc numbers via Settings=>Library=>Lists=>Show Disc. 

When 'Disc# and Track#' was included as a separate item in the sort ordering page, the old 'Track#' that most people were already using actually sorted by Discs too anyway, it just didn't say so. I reported this a while ago as I felt Track# should have a discrete behaviour compared to Disc#/Track#, but at the time Max was concerned too many people were already using it and changing over to the 'correct' behaviour at that point would have caused confusion. Personally I still feel that if both options actually work the same way anyway (sort by Disc# then Track#) then what's the point in giving them different names?

Andre

[Stuart Bruce]

Thanks everyone for the replies.

Unfortunately, I don't think the disc number tag is the issue here. I turned the Show Disc option as @andrewilley suggested, but the disc number on all the tracks is "1" (assuming I am looking at the correct tag). So if the "by track #" sort is ordering by disc number first, then by track number, it ought to be in order.

There's a large library on my phone and I'd estimate that about 50% of the albums on there are affected in this way, it's definitely not limited to just the original example I posted. Attached are some screengrabs showing the previous Orbital album with the disc number showing, and a different album showing the same symptoms.

It appears that for these two albums, I can sort by filename and it sorts successfully, which is probably due to the settings I've used to push the files across from MusicBee. However I don't think I can always rely on the filename having a numerical prefix to sort by. Ideally, sort "by track #" would actually sort by track number!

 

[andrewilley]

Sorting 'By Track#' or 'By Disc and Track#' should give pretty much the same results, especially as your disc numbers are all '1' - which may mean they are actually 1, or sometimes if the tag is empty that may default to 1 too.

Something is clearly wrong here as that sorting method works perfectly for me (and many other users) across a large number of albums.

Could you perhaps temporarily upload a few sample files for checking, perhaps something like Wide Angle tracks 9, 3 and 8 which seem to jump around?

Andre

[Stuart Bruce]

As suggested, I've temporarily uploaded the three tracks from "Wide Angle" that should be ordering numerically, but aren't.

You should be OK to find them here: http://www.twentypenguins.co.uk/misc/poweramp_ordering_issue/

For obvious reasons I will take these tracks down after a few days, or once there's a solution at hand.

For what it's worth, the background of these files is that I bought these albums on Compact Disc (remember them?) in a record shop (remember them?) in the 1990's (remember them?). Then around 2007-ish I imported the CD's into iTunes. I've been rocking iTunes (and Rocket Player) ever since despite its age, until earlier this year when I imported the whole library into MusicBee. It's MusicBee's sync functions that have pushed the files onto my phone. The files above are copied directly from my phone.

The point being, the metadata and tags ought to be consistent and valid and reasonably sensible. If I had naughtily downloaded random tracks off the internet I would understand if the metadata was all messed up, but that's not the situation here.

I've played this album many times in Rocket Player and not had this ordering issue, until I gave up on Rocket Player earlier this year for unrelated reasons.

 

[andrewilley]

I can't replicate this with those three tracks, they sort correctly by Track Number in the album view (and others):

They are M4A files (which for some odd reason downloaded with .mp3 extenders, which I had to rename) with Quicktime tags - which are not the most complaint of tagging formats, but that's nothing unusual for Apple content - but the tags do look fine to me:

[QuickTime]     HandlerVendorID                 : Apple
[QuickTime]     Title                           : Sinequanon
[QuickTime]     Artist                          : Hybrid
[QuickTime]     Album                           : Wide Angle [UK]
[QuickTime]     Genre                           : Electronica/Dance
[QuickTime]     TrackNumber                     : 8 of 12
[QuickTime]     DiskNumber                      : 1 of 1
[QuickTime]     ContentCreateDate               : 1999

Andre

[andrewilley]

Have you tried a FULL Rescan (in Settings=>Library) in case there is some old data in there (although it doesn't look like it from your screenshots)? Sync software like Musicbee doesn't always update time-modified stamps as expected, so triggering a forced fresh re-read of all the data might help. 

Andre

[MotleyG]

49 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

They are M4A files (which for some odd reason downloaded with .mp3 extenders, which I had to rename)

This is a common problem with online YouTube "converter" apps that pull audio from YouTube videos. And while they add the .mp3 extension to the filename, they are in fact using the AAC codec in mp4 format. Several discussions on the mp3tag forum about this issue. Mp3Tag Corrupts my MP3 files after editing

But this shouldn't happen if you rip your own CD's unless using a similar online tool for the job (not recommended in my opinion).

[6b6561]

Just a guess... mpeg4 used to write the metadata at the end of the file, which might have lead to Poweramp indexing the file before the whole file has been copied to the phone. If this is the case, then the Poweramp meta data would be missing the data and this would be resolved by a full rescan.

@Stuart Brucecould you share a screen shot of how the meta data looks in Poweramp on your phone?

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, 6b6561 said:

Just a guess... mpeg4 used to write the metadata at the end of the file, which might have lead to Poweramp indexing the file before the whole file has been copied to the phone.

I can see that happening for a single file if the file-creation and scan timings just happened to exactly coincide, but not really with multiple files. But a FULL Rescan, as I suggested above, would eliminate that possibility.

It does look like tags have been correctly scanned into the database though, as the list contains full title, album, artist, track/disc, etc details. And even though there is no album art, auto-download might have been turned off.

Viewing Info/Tags displays the current tags as immediately re-read from the audio file by the way, it doesn't just show the scanned database contents.

Andre 

[Stuart Bruce]

Apologies for the delayed reply to this.

Somehow this issue seems to have magically fixed itself after a second full rescan. I was going to post after one full rescan to say that it was still happening, but another poke with MusicBee first then another full rescan after, and suddenly those albums (and all the other examples I have found) now suddenly seem to be sorting correctly in disc order.

I can't see the logic behind this (why tracks 9 then 3 then 8? why did Poweramp show the correct track numbers, but fail to sort by them when the sort mode was "Track #"? I just don't get it), but for the moment it does appear to be fixed. I'll come back and post an update if I see something similar happening again though.

Thanks

[andrewilley]

55 minutes ago, Stuart Bruce said:

I can't see the logic behind this (why tracks 9 then 3 then 8? why did Poweramp show the correct track numbers, but fail to sort by them when the sort mode was "Track #"?

Looking back on your old posts, all of them seem to have been sorted on screen alphabetically by title. Not sure why, but that certainly explains the otherwise random numeric order.

Andre