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Author Topic: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?  (Read 1602 times)

Link

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Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« on: June 24, 2008, 12:11:16 pm »

I have something on the order of 500GB of music, with varying quality of tags.  Anything I have ripped in the last few years is flac with perfect/consistent tags, but I have some older rips of dubious origin that may be less than clear, and have not yet been scrubbed. 

Yesterday I started playing with the new Thin Panes view....really love it.  However, I found some odd behavior in sorting that switching to this view from my previous tile oriented world.

1) My previous standard view was Album thumbnails in a "tile" view, sorted by Filename(path).  By using a consistent Artist/Album directory structure, this gave me the ordering I wanted (I used "Zappa, Frank" as opposed to sorting by "Frank Zappa" artists).

2) I switched to the new thin panes view (didn't like the look of panes previously), and told it to sort in the same manner.

3) I immediately noticed that a group of album thumbnails were at the top of the list prior to "AC/DC", which had previously been first.

4) A little digging a tag investigation taught me that there were certain scenarios that cause these files to ignore the requested sort order, and instead be dropped at the top of the list.

What needs to happen:
-2 sets of files, each in their own directory, each consisting of a full album, each with the same album name.

I had these from a few different scenarios:
-An old MP3 copy, with a newer recent FLAC copy in a different directory
-A live show, where I had recordings from 2 different sources, each with the same album name ("Live 2004-12-13 Seattle")
-A multi-disk set, with each disk in a separate sub directory, made the album name the same, but never set the disk number
-2 versions of the same album - one the original, one a newer remastered version with the same tracks.  This was not given a unique album name in this case, but had the same name as the original.


So, is this intentional?  It is confusing, but if you believe you should never have albums tagged like this, I guess you could argue that it is highlighting poor quality tags for you to address by dropping them on top......but it definitely added confusion while trying to create a view scheme I liked.
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Matt

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Re: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« Reply #1 on: June 24, 2008, 12:58:07 pm »

What is the exact sorting specified in the view?

Check the fields in the sorting one-by-one until you see a difference.

Hopefully it'll explain what you're seeing.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

marko

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Re: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2008, 01:45:27 pm »

I have an album thumbs view that I set to sort by [import date], and bumped into a similar question. ([import date] is just a custom field that gives me [date imported] without the time)

I found my answer by setting the thumbnail text to display [import date] which revealed that the albums sorting out of order were showing an [import date] of varies.

Could this be what's going on for you too?

-marko.

hit_ny

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Re: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2008, 02:18:53 pm »

I found my answer by setting the thumbnail text to display [import date] which revealed that the albums sorting out of order were showing an [import date] of varies.
Was looking at some viewschemes sorted by [Last Played]-d and quite a few have that field as <vaires> but still seem to sort ok.

I recall using [import date]-d as a sort criterion for another view and did not notice any problems, a random check on 10 albums shows all of them have <varies> for that field.

View scheme displays as album thumbnails.
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Link

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Re: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2008, 09:36:44 pm »

What is the exact sorting specified in the view?

Check the fields in the sorting one-by-one until you see a difference.

Hopefully it'll explain what you're seeing.

This view contains : Filename(Path), Album Artist (Auto), and Album.
Sort rules are: Filename (Path) (a-z), then Album (a-z)

When looking at the suspect files, the Album Artists are the same, the Albums are the same, but the Filename(path) is different (as they are in different folders.)  I am not surprised that they show up as a second thumbnail - but rather that they show up as the first sorted album, even though that does not obey the sorting of the rest of the Filename(path)s.

This behavior is the same even if my view has only Album as an item.

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Link

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Re: Bug with Sorting...or is it a "feature"?
« Reply #5 on: June 26, 2008, 10:01:46 am »

After a little playing, I have come up with a simple way to demonstrate and reproduce the issue:

1) View scheme can be as simple as Artist/Album, using panes, displaying album thumbnails
2) Sorting based on Filename(path)
3) Copy one folder to a second location in explorer and import.
4) See that the files are not sorted at either location they exist relative to the rest, but somewhere different entirely.


While this is not a realistic scenario (see my initial comments for some ways you could have these "duplicates" that are legitimate), it easily demonstrates an oddity with the sorting behavior.

Thanks for the attention (and all of the great features)!
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