Track ordering - 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2, 20

[King Mustard]

I have many podcasts (of the same series) in a folder.

The title tag is Season 1 - Episode 1, then Season 1 - Episode 2, up to Season 1 - Episode 26

Poweramp plays them as Episode 1, Episode 10, Epsiode 11 etc.

Is there a way to make Poweramp 1, 2, 3 etc without changing the title tags themselves to 01, 02, 03 etc

[andrewilley]

Are the filenames named the same way, or using numbers properly as 01, 02, ... 28? If they are correct, you could sort by filename. Otherwise, PA is sorting the titles correctly using alphabetic sorting.

Andre

[King Mustard]

5 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Are the filenames named the same way, or using numbers properly as 01, 02, ... 28? If they are correct, you could sort by filename. Otherwise, PA is sorting the titles correctly using alphabetic sorting.

Andre

Filesnames are:

Series 1 - 2001-11-10
Series 1 - 2001-11-17
Series 1 - 2001-11-24
etc.

Though in this instance, I want it to use the title tags, which are:

Season 1 - Episode 1
Season 1 - Episode 2
Season 1 - Episode 3
etc.

Poweramp does appear to prioritise the title tags, which is good.

However, 10 should never be above 1 when it comes to something like this, in my opinion. I don't fancy changing the tag to 01, 02 etc., personally.

Even an option to choose the sorting type would be handy :)

Edited February 14, 2023 by King Mustard

[andrewilley]

@King Mustard use menu=> List Options when you are viewing the tracks list to choose the sorting order.

But in pure ASCII alphabetic text sorting, 1 comes before 2, so "1abc" comes before "2abc" and also 1 comes before "11abc", it's just text characters.

Andre

[King Mustard]

15 hours ago, andrewilley said:

@King Mustard use menu=> List Options when you are viewing the tracks list to choose the sorting order.

But in pure ASCII alphabetic text sorting, 1 comes before 2, so "1abc" comes before "2abc" and also 1 comes before "11abc", it's just text characters.

Andre

Menu > List options > By title is still not using real-world (I don't mean literal) logic. It's still putting 10 after 1.

[andrewilley]

17 minutes ago, King Mustard said:

Menu > List options > By title is still not using real-world (I don't mean literal) logic. It's still putting 10 after 1.

I meant that filename sorting might work better for you, as the examples you quoted seem very well defined for sorting (using yyyy-mm-dd for example). 

PA doesn't do any smart interpretation of strings (other than optionally ignoring articles such as "The", "A" or "An") it just treats Titles as simply alphanumeric pieces of text.

So letters such as:
a > aa > aaa > b > bb > bbb
are processed the same defined way as anything else, so with ASCII codes 48-57 (i.e. numbers) that gives you:
1 > 11 > 111> 2 > 22 > 222

So in the same way as you would write track numbers as 01, 02, 03, etc in filenames, you need to prefix any single-digit items with zeroes if you want to have them sorted as longer numbers.

I'm going to move this to Feature Requests anyway, as having an option to re-interpret string sorting is something that has been requested before.

Andre

[King Mustard]

6 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I meant that filename sorting might work better for you, as the examples you quoted seem very well defined for sorting (using yyyy-mm-dd for example). 

PA doesn't do any smart interpretation of strings (other than optionally ignoring articles such as "The", "A" or "An") it just treats Titles as simply alphanumeric pieces of text.

So letters such as:
a > aa > aaa > b > bb > bbb
are processed the same defined way as anything else, so with ASCII codes 48-57 (i.e. numbers) that gives you:
1 > 11 > 111> 2 > 22 > 222

So in the same way as you would write track numbers as 01, 02, 03, etc in filenames, you need to prefix any single-digit items with zeroes if you want to have them sorted as longer numbers.

I'm going to move this to Feature Requests anyway, as having an option to re-interpret string sorting is something that has been requested before.

Andre

Filename sorting worked in my instance, thank you!

And also thank you for suggesting it to the team 😊

[andrewilley]

You're welcome. It was already in the Frequently Requested Features list by the way:

• Smart sorting of alphanumeric fields (e.g. sort compound-numbers as whole numeric items, improved sorting of non-English characters, ignore punctuation marks at the start of text tags, etc).

Andre