[reggoboy]

Hi folks!

I can't seem to find documentation or discussion in the forum on:

Collection > Sort > Numerically

It doesn't seem to behave differently than Alphabetically, but I really don't know what it's designed to do. So I'd like to understand how this feature works.

But I'll also explain what I'm trying to do. One group I play with does Sinatra stuff, and Sinatra has a number for every song, and the leader calls out songs by number. So I renamed those songs with the number to the left of the song name so that I could sort the Setlist or Collection and quickly find songs by name. So "Fly Me To The Moon" is now "01-Fly Me To The Moon".

But for all non-Sinatra playing I do, having the leading number is just annoying and ruins natural sorting. Ie, I'd really like "01-Fly Me To The Moon" to sort as "F" in most contexts. 

I thought I read somewhere that the Numerical sort feature would find the number, even if it wasn't on the left hand of the song name, and sort by it. But a simple test of trying something like "Fly Me To The Moon-01" put this at the bottom of the list of songs that still had the digits on the left hand side.

Feedback and info welcome! Thanks!

Dave

[Zubersoft]

Dave,

If you had songs with numbers at the start sorted alphabetically, you would get this

1 - Song One
10 - Song Ten
100 - Song One Hundred
11 - Song Eleven

The numeric sorting should put those in the order you would expect. You asked if it can detect numbers at the end - it can, but only when comparing against other songs with numbers at the end I believe, and it will use an alphabetic sorting for the content before the number. So if you had

Song 10
Song 11
Song 100

The numeric sorting would properly handle sorting those, whereas alphabetic will not. However if you have

AWord 10
CWord 11
BWord 100

the numeric sorting is first going to sort on that first letter, so it would end up as

AWord 10
BWord 100
CWord 11

This is to ensure the numeric sorting is still usable for entries without any number at all.

Mike

[Learux]

Maybe make a different list with just Sinatra song with the numbers in front of it.

It will be easy to switch between the two lists.

[Geoff Bacon]

Put the Sinatra number in one of the other fields (e.g. Custom or Custom2)
Precede any single digits with a 0.

Display the filter and set the Search to Any Field
When song number is called, enter the number in the search field (at least 2 digits)
Select the song from the displayed list.

This allows you to filter by name or by number

Geoff

[reggoboy]

Thanks, all, for the tips.

@Zubersoft - Thanks for explaining. It sounds like your feature solves the problem of people not left-padding numbers in Song Titles with zeroes. Makes sense. But it doesn't sound like there's any way to sort by numbers without putting those digits on the left. 

@Geoff's idea provides an alternative to sort: search. More clumsy and time consuming than a quick visual scan of sorted tunes, but it does work. I tried using the Custom field. Don't forget to go into Song Title Formatting and displaying it, which can be handy:

%TITLE%  %CUSTOM%

And I have confirmed that the %CUSTOM% portion doesn't export when I Generate Song List, so that's good. 

I kind of wish I could use:

%TITLE%  [%CUSTOM%]

but then all the tunes with no Sinatra # still show the [], which is unfortunate. 

Still, this is better than what I had before, so thanks :-)

[reggoboy]

I kind of wish I could use:

%TITLE%  [%CUSTOM%]

but then all the tunes with no Sinatra # still show the [], which is unfortunate. 

Aha, solved this with the cool conditional formatting feature:

%TITLE% %CUSTOM:[Sinatra ${VALUE}]|%

[Zubersoft]

I'm glad you found the documentation on that. I want to have a tutorial video explaning it at some point, as it's not the easiest to use (definitely a feature only for advanced users).

Mike