GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 586988
Sort fields are not retained
Last modified: 2020-03-17 08:20:04 UTC
Please describe the problem: Information saved to the new sort fields (e.g. Sort Artist, Sort Album Artist) is not retained after I shut down banshee. I'm using v. 1.5.0.0. Saving appears to be working correctly, but on restart, all sort fields are blank. Steps to reproduce: 1. I can change the 'Sort Artist' and 'Sort Album Artist' fields for an album to <surname, firstname> and hit save. 2. Observe the artist being listed under their surname. 3. Restart banshee. 4. Artist should be listed by first name again with sort fields being blank. Actual results: Artist is returned to first name instead of surname. Expected results: Artist should remain listed under their surname. Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: I've had a little more time to take a look at this, and it looks like I don't even need to close the program for it to strip out the Sort Artist. In the morning, I can change the Sort Artist field for "Jack McDuff" to "McDuff, Jack." It will work immediately, changing the sort order for those tracks. I can go back and look the tags right away, and it's still correct. But even leaving Banshee open all day, by the time I get back from work, it will be back under "Jack McDuff." I look at the Sort Artist tag, and it's blank. Odd behavior indeed.
Downstream bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/385030
And this happens every time for you? I noticed it once, a couple weeks ago, but I haven't seen it since, and I certainly can't reproduce it reliably. First, I went through all of my music, manually changed all artists like "The Decemberists" to sort as "Decemberists, The". Then - I think the next day - I backed up my Banshee database (and a bunch of other things) and reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04. I installed Banshee from the unstable PPA and copied in my database that should have had correct sort artists, but they were all blank. I just assumed that something caused the database to lose the information when I reinstalled Banshee, but my problem sounds similar to yours. I just re-updated all of my sort artists, so I'll keep a close eye on it.
As I mentioned in my last post, after having this problem, I went through my music and manually changed the sortartist for artists named "The *" to "*, The". Many - but not all - of these artists are once again sorted under "The" and the Sort Track Artist field seems to be blank. The value for Sort Album Artist is still set correctly. I'm not quite sure what would have caused this, and even less sure why this only happened for some of my artists. Can anyone else confirm this?
And again, the Sort Track Artist field is blank for many artists, but Sort Album Artist is not. I'm going to make a list here mostly so I can make comparisons if it happens again. The Album Leaf, The Almost, The Appleseed Cast, The Cranberries, The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips, The Guggenheim Grotto, The Holy Fire, The Killers, The King's Singers, The Most Serene Republic, The New Pornographers, The Rosebuds, The Shins, The Thermals, The Wallflowers, The Weepies All of the songs by these artists lost the Sort Track Artist data, but again it's only some of the artists that I set manually, not all of them.
For some reason taglib-sharp disappeared from my computer. I thought that reinstalling it may have caused the problem this time, but the list of artists that didn't retain their sort artist is uncannily similar to last time: The Album Leaf, The Almost, The Appleseed Cast, The Cranberries, The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips, The Guggenheim Grotto, The Holy Fire, The Killers, The King's Singers, The New Pornographers, The Rosebuds, The Shins, The Terms, The Thermals, The Twilight Collective, The Twilight Sad, The Union Trade, The Unseen, The Used, The Vines, The Waiting, The Walkmen, The Wallflowers, The Wedding, The Weepies, The White Stripes, The Wonders The Most Serene Republic is missing this time, and several artists were added near the end, but the first half is identical to last time. Again, this is fewer than half of my artists that begin with "The", so the fact that the list is so similar is really strange.
This information posted downstream could be pretty useful: >Just want to confirm that this is still an issue in 1.5.1. > >I've been running with --debug the past couple days, and noticed this message >that correlated with the loss of my modified sort tags: > >~$ banshee --debug >** Running Mono with --debug ** >[Warn 07:44:35.098] The Banshee indexer is currently running. Banshee will be >started when the indexer finishes. >:~$ > >After a few moments, Banshee starts as normal, but debug information does not >appear. I've also noticed the indexer warning, and I've also noticed the bug in question. I never connected the two, though. Question for developers: what triggers the "Banshee indexer" business. I get that warning sometimes, but I don't know how to make it happen reliably, and I'd like to test the correlation between that warning and songs losing their sort field information.
This may be unrelated, but taking a look at SortKeyUpdater.cs I wondered if there's a typo there, on line 60: ArtistNameSortKey = HYENA_COLLATION_KEY(COALESCE(ArtistName, ?)), ^^^^^^^^^^ Should that be "ArtistNameSort" there, instead of "ArtistName"? I've no understanding of the code at all, but that just looks unexpected.
Good catch. It actually should be "ArtistNameSort, ArtistName, ?" so that if ArtistNameSort is null it falls back to ArtistName (and then falls back to ?, which is the localized "Unknown Artist" string). I've got the patch ready, but will hold off pushing it until after the release today.
I’m still getting this problem. I keep adding “Sort Album Artist” and “Sort Album Title” data to tracks, and sometimes it will succeed and sometimes it will not. If it succeeds, the album will be sorted according to the sort fields, but if it fails, nothing will happen, and then “edit track information” will show blank sort fields once more. I don’t have to wait or restart Banshee at all; entering anything into sort fields for certain albums and saving just won’t do anything.
Sounds similar to bug #633619
Banshee is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes more than three years ago. Its codebase has been archived. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is being shut down) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/264 for more info.