GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 525889
Restore old sort behavior
Last modified: 2008-04-03 07:07:15 UTC
In previous versions of Banshee, sorting by album would group by the album, but then sort by artist, album, and track number. This was a nice behavior for multi-artist albums, espcially hits albums where the artist varies slightly. (For example "Diana Ross", "Diana Ross and the Supremes", "The Supremes"). On a related note, I've always thought it would be nice to have a "sort artist" field.
Gabe asked me attach some screenshots. I'm attaching one now that I think exhibits the behavior. Notice that I'm sorting on 'Album', but Alejandro Escovedo's "Gravity" is coming right after Albert Kings' "I'll Play the Blues for You", clearly indicating an initial artist sort. Notice also that after "Gravity" comes "Por Vida (Disc 1)". Although all these tracks have different artists, they're nicely grouped together. Awesomely enough, none of the tracks you can see in the screenshot are by Alejandro Escovedo, but the album is grouped with him. This Por Vida was an album of covers of Alejandro songs put out as a benefit when he was stricken with Hepatitis. The last two tracks of Disc 2 are actually by Alejandro. I'm not sure exactly how Banshee put that album there, but it was spot on.
Created attachment 108519 [details] screenshot
excluding our current non-existant-multi-artist-album handling, is there really anything wrong w/ our album sort? if you sort by artist, it does artist, album, disc, etc multi-artist album support is a known/filed issue (and a high priority one, one that should be fixed by 1.0) so...not sure how that multi-artist album got there either, but ideally when we support multi-artist albums, if we sort on AlbumArtist and that's set to Alejandro Escovedo, it would be the same result
Holy bazunga. I just realized that I'm not, in fact, seeing some very clever grouping for multi-artist albums. I'm seeing a bug that happened to manage to do what I want. I'm attaching another screenshot. Sorting by album isn't doing anything clever. It's showing the albums in the order they were added to Banshee's database. For the vast majority of my music, that happens to be alphabetical first by (album) artist, then by album. Because that's how they are on my filesystem, and I imported most of my music from already ripped files. Notice how John Mayall and Sharon Jones are at the top. I ripped those with Banshee.
Created attachment 108526 [details] screenshot
Heh, sorry to disillusion you about stable. :-/ Closing this as a duplicate of the multi-artist bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 517671 ***