GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 314149
Library sorting order / Library columns
Last modified: 2008-09-15 19:59:05 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu Breezy + Garnome I would like to have the library sorted after Artist - Album - Tracknumber. So that the library starts with the first song of the first album (first == the album starting wth the lowest letter) of the first artist (again, first == the artist starting wth the lowest letter). Right now the default sorting order seems to be the import order. In my case, I have both oggs and mp3s, imported from different directories so the first half of the list is ogg (A-Z) and the second half is mp3 (again A-Z). Manually re-ordering by clicking the column headers doesn't work, as for example, after sorting for artists, the track column is not in order anymore. Also, banshee doesn't seem to store this in any way, restarting the application brings back the default sorting order. Releated to this: Banshee doesn't save visible colums, so if you disable one, it reappears the next time you start banshee.
This is all correct. The sorting is very, very basic, and is not stored. This will be implemented somewhat soon, but has a slightly low priority. Thanks for your concern!
Why shouldn't Banshee use a similar library interface to Rhythmbox/iTunes? I have like a 2000 files in my library, all in the same library instead of a sorted library. IMHO, Sorting capability is the number one feature in a music management app.
I have the same exact problem. After hiding the tracks, rating, and last played columns and restarting, the tracks column is still hidden but the later two are back. Looking in gconf-editor while running banshee, when I uncheck those three colums in view>columns and exit banshee, the visible checkbox for tracks dis- appears as it should but the other two do absolutely nothing. If I manually uncheck them while they are unchecked in the columns dialog and restart banshee the checks reappear in gconf-editor. So for atleast those two columns, banshee doesn't seem to be saving it's settings for those two columns.
I filed bug 326947 on column visibility.
I prefer to see tracks ordeered by title, because if there is many albums of one artist and I don't remember in which album there is one specific song I need to search a little bit, IMHO a normal person think to the track title not to the track number in the album :)
In several genres of music the order of the track is very important like classical or electronic music where one wants to hear the next track that continues the flow o the music and not the next track ordered by title.
My Bug 326643 is sadly a duplicate of this bug ;-)
*** Bug 326643 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Info from Bug 326643: Opened by Øivind Hoel 2006-01-11 18:41 UTC > Currently, it seems banshee only supports sorting by one column at a time. > > This leads to weirdness(tm) when you want to have the your list sorted > alphabetically by artist, but keep albums separate. > > Sorting by artist result: http://appelsinjuice.org/banshee_sortbyartist.png - > Note how albums come up as an incoherent list. > > Sorting by album: http://appelsinjuice.org/banshee_sortbyalbum.png - Note the > wildly different names of the bottom two artists in my list. > > This situation makes browsing the library a bit of a pain, atleast to me, so I > propose adding the ability to sort by multiple, atleast two columns ;) Comment #1 from Adam Lofts 2006-01-12 23:00 UTC > Created an attachment (id=57252) > Implement default sorting of the playlist view > > This is a patch to implement sorting. Sorts by Artist, Album, TrackNumber. > > It seems only to sort if you click a column header 3 times. (i.e. to reset the > sorting to the "DefaultSortFunction"). This has advantages (like it not > delaying banshee startup). Comment #2 from Jeremy Cook 2006-01-16 05:07 UTC > Hopefully some of this would be automatic as well. For example, if I click to > sort by album, the secondary sort should automatically be by track number.
Moving to the User Interface component.
As an additional comment, the problem could be alleviated significantly if the searching of fields with identical content kept them in the same order (eg, searching by album sorted the albums then searching by artist sorted the artist but using the previous ordering for the identical artist fields). This seems to be a pretty obvious thing to me and perhaps should be sorted in Gtk. Although i'm sure there is some computer science backend reason why this is not a good way.
Sorting Artist/Album/TrackNum is just a simple radix sort... sort first by TrackNum, then by Album, then by Artist. Unfortunately, Banshee does not seem to end up in the correct order after doing this. I suspect that either: a. The sort algorithm is not a stable sort (likely, since I expect the developers are using the fastest sort algorithm available, which may not be stable) b. Each sort is performed anew on the backend list instead of the previously-sorted list (also likely, just on a hunch) Perhaps these suggestions will help... ?
I would consider this a fairly severe bug in banshee. I find myself irritated by it pretty much every time I use banshee. I think the ideal solution would be to have a preference called "Default Sort Order" and while running, as David suggested, for each successive sort to act on the previous sorted list.
I second "Simon Butler" on this one, not being able to control the sorting is very annoying it should default to: "Artist -> album -> track number" like iTunes, some sort of config option would also be nice.
A track number sort is now done by sorting artist, then album, then track number.
Created attachment 118718 [details] sort, search screenshots
I am having similar issues in version 1.2.1 on Ubuntu 8.04. Both search and sort are substantially impaired with fairly consistent behavior. Sort does not sort properly, and Track Number always seems to be present, even if I remove the column for it. File type is also not displayed, though based on the first post of this bug, I'd imagine it's playing a role. By clicking Track, then Album, then Artist, then Title, I get NEARLY the sort order that I want (same as Lars Roland), however the tracks are descending rather than ascending, and things are sorted by Album, not Artist. Swapping the order of when I click Album and Artist has no effect. The images in the tarball illustrate the states of my library through this process from launching Banshee. Not apparent from "2 album" is that I have more than one album beginning with a number, not just the 2005 Derek Bailey release shown. Also notice that there is absolutely NO change between clicking Album and Artist. "5 track" shows what happens after I click Track again after the previously described sequence. It appears to be sorted by album for the first few things, then quickly degenerates to being sorted by track, independent of album or artist. The degeneration occurs by simply scrolling down, not through any other sorting action. Clear in "5 track" is many tracks by the artist Hrvatski. Images 6 and 7 show search results for "Hrv" which yeild no results. Sorry for the long-winded post, but I wanted to be specific, as it seems these traits are not adequately described above. I have tried reinstalling the software in Synaptic and nothing changes.
(In reply to comment #17) > Sort does not sort properly It appears the only one sorted incorrectly is "4 track", and title sorts have been a problem for some people before. Can you reach out for some support? (Bug reports are not the right place for support.) Support links are here: http://banshee-project.org/support. (If you choose the mailing list, I'll be there to answer. :) > Clear in "5 track" is many tracks by the artist Hrvatski. Images 6 and 7 show > search results for "Hrv" which yeild no results. That's a different problem than what was described here, and be sure to mention that when you ask for help; it could be a more general problem.
Apologies for potentially posting in the wrong place. I'm still not convinced this is a support issue, but I will reach out to the mailing list or IRC later today. In the meantime, > It appears the only one sorted incorrectly is "4 track" I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. There is no difference between "2 album" and "3 artist" at all, throughout the whole library, not just the first 20 or so tracks listed in the picture. That in and of itself seems substantially problematic to me (in a buggy way, not a support way). I'll address the search issue after I've investigated it more thoroughly with whoever's on IRC at the time.
(In reply to comment #19) > There is no difference > between "2 album" and "3 artist" at all, throughout the whole library, not just > the first 20 or so tracks listed in the picture. That in and of itself seems > substantially problematic to me (in a buggy way, not a support way). Then your sample tracks have conspired against you. :) Album sort will sort by Album then by Artist; you have "/2/A/C/D. Artist sort will sort by Artist then by Album; you have Da/De/K/M/V. It just so happens that both are sorted correctly in that case, so it's hard to tell. Either way, the real sensitivity on this bug is just that it's been open for a really long time and has been fixed for almost two years, so it's unlikely that this is the same bug (if a bug at all; there has been a lot of discussion on other bug reports about sorting problems that turn out not to be bugs).