12-08-2019, 02:12 AM (This post was last modified: 12-08-2019, 03:15 AM by hlbuck.)
Hello!
Right now, there's the one option to ignore the formatted song title and just sort by title alphabetically. But what about sorting by other criteria, like album, genre etc?
Alternatively, what about a second song title formatting option for display? Say you want song titles to appear as "Song by Artist from Album," but you want them to be sorted by Artist, then Album, then Song. That is, the A-Z sorting option first sorts by artist, then sub-sorts by album, then by song.
One more idea, or kind of the same thing: an option to sort using the caption instead of the formatted title.
The sorting is already fairly complex due to the wide number of options and the amount of processing that occurs. Sorting by fields other than the title would definitely throw wrenches into the design. That's not to say that I can't do it, it's just to say that it's not a simple change and would most likely require a fair amount of work. The other problem is that sorting by fields other than the title can result in confusing results, as the data isn't grouped. So if you sorted by "Artist", but Artist wasn't part of the caption, the songs would seem at a glance to be randomly sorted and it would be confusing. Even if Artist is in the caption, it's not easy at a glance to identify which songs are grouped together. Without a heirarchical representation of the song list (so that songs could be grouped under each Artist like a tree control) I don't think it would work well at all. If I'm going to add support for heirarchical representations of the songs like that, then it's far better for me just to extend that as a mode to all of the existing group tabs. So you could go to the Artists tab, and there would be an "Expand All" option and you could then see all songs listed under all Artists. This too would require a significant number of changes to support, but it would at least support every group tab once finished. Also, with an "Expand All" option like that, you could go to the Albums tab, tap the circle with a down arrow at the right side of the filters, tap the artist dropdown, select the artist, tap OK, and now you would see all albums from that artist sorted by album.
Sorting by multiple group types adds even more complexity to the sorting algorithm. To support that, I would need to provide a way to indicate the fields you want to support by along with the order of each field in the sorting. Visualizing the sorting in this way could once again be very confusing. I'm not sure what the best way is to make it clear how things are sorted if you choose multiple fields that aren't part of the song caption or title. Applications that I can think of that allow this kind of sorting are column based so that you can see the values of each column and quickly make sense of the multiple levels of sorting that are applied. I'm open to feedback on this from more users as to how useful it is. The more feedback I get, the higher the priority will be for implementing something like this.
Thanks for the taking the time to explain this. I see what you mean. Seems like the biggest issue (aside from just the work required) is how confusing things could look if they were sorted by criteria that weren't included in the formatted title/caption. And I get that the manner of organizing I'm asking for is pretty obscure. Thanks for all your work on this app as always!
I figured out a bit of a workaround for what I had in mind: Add whatever metadata I want to sort by to the formatted song title, then enter a bunch of spaces, then enter the metadata that I originally wanted to display in the title. Add a bunch of spaces to the caption too so that it lines up under the title. Figured I'd share:
Only drawback is that the vertical alignment of title and caption changes relative to the length of the initial metadata, but that's workable. In this case, I'm using just numerals to indicate counts (whether a piece is "in 2," "in 3," etc.).
