GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 616737
Banshee sorts by hidden columns
Last modified: 2020-03-17 08:47:43 UTC
When you sort your music by the artist column, the album name is always used as the secondary sort field, followed by track number, even if those columns are not being shown. This makes the songs seem to be sorted randomly for each artist, since the song names are not taken into account by the sort algorithm. For example, with only the artist and track name columns showing, you would see the following: ARTIST | NAME Guns N' Roses | Patience Guns N' Roses | Don't Cry Guns N' Roses | November Rain That appears to be sorted incorrectly, and only seems ok when the other columns are also visible, example: ARTIST | ALBUM | NUMBER | NAME Guns N' Roses | G N' R Lies | 5 | Patience Guns N' Roses | Use Your Illusion I | 4 | Don't Cry Guns N' Roses | Use Your Illusion I | 10 | November Rain Perhaps Banshee should automatically ignore hidden columns when sorting, or maybe just allow the user to specify a sort variable, such as "%A - %T" to sort by artist then track name. I am using Banshee 1.6.0-1 on Lucid (pre-release), but I've noticed this since I started using Banshee, several releases back. I originally reported this here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/569311
Do you actually want them sorted differently? Really? I do not understand the use case. Why would you ever want them sorted "%A - %T"? (Note you can do that if you filter on the artist you want, and then click to order by Name, though I understand it's different).
Hi Gabriel, A use case: I have Banshee playing songs randomly and it starts playing a song I don't really want to hear, but I decide I want to another song by the same artist. Since I have many albums by that artist, but I haven't taken the time to memorize which songs are on which albums, I am essentially looking at a list of "random" songs for that artist. I don't even know whether to scroll up or down when looking through the unordered track names. By default, the music library should be sorted primarily by artist, and I think that most people would agree on that. This means that (unless I'm missing a better way to do it) my only options other than looking through the "random" list would be one of the following: 1.Right click on the track, search by matching artist, click the 'Name' column to sort, find the song I want to hear and play it, clear the search field, and then click the 'Artist' column to go back to sorting by artist. 2. Go to View > Show Browser (its normally hidden to save monitor space since I'm using a laptop), scroll or quick-find to the artist I'm already at in the music library, click the 'Name' column to sort, find the song I want to hear and play it, and then go to View > Show Browser to hide it again. Honestly, because of the way I use Banshee the album column seems unnecessary to me, and therefore so does the track number. Sorting by Artist and then Track Name seems to me the only sensible way to sort if those are the only 2 fields showing, but even if you have the album and track number showing its still seems like a valid option for sorting. Maybe I just think this way because I grew up using mp3 players like Winamp that just showed "Artist - Title" in the playlist, or like foobar2000 that let you put whatever fields you wanted in the columns and specify a format for sorting :)
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.