sorting options for browsing by album?

[aubuti]

One of the things I love about the SC web ui is the ability to sort by Artist / Year / Album when browsing albums. It closely mimics the way I've been looking at my shelves of LPs and CDs since Nixon was president. It's especially appealing when displaying album art. Afaik, that's currently not possible with either the standard remote or with the SBC. If you browse by album, you get albums sorted by the album title. And if you browse by artist you have to "branch" into each artist's sublist to see albums.

Does the option to sort album browsing by Artist / Year exist and I'm just missing it? It would be great if the SBC could do the same thing as the web ui in this instance.

[gerph]

One of the things I love about the SC web ui is the ability to sort by Artist / Year / Album when browsing albums. It closely mimics the way I've been looking at my shelves of LPs and CDs since Nixon was president. It's especially appealing when displaying album art. Afaik, that's currently not possible with either the standard remote or with the SBC. If you browse by album, you get albums sorted by the album title. And if you browse by artist you have to "branch" into each artist's sublist to see albums.

Does the option to sort album browsing by Artist / Year exist and I'm just missing it? It would be great if the SBC could do the same thing as the web ui in this instance.

Bug #112.

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=112

I find that I know how to find albums by the order they're released, not by their name. If I want to play Script For A Jester's Tear, I know it's at the start of the album list, not the end.

[aubuti]

Thanks for the pointer to the bug. It's interesting to see an issue raised in the Jive context linked back to a bug that was opened in 2003.

Are you saying you prefer to sort only (ie, globally) on Year, as opposed to my preference of Artist / Year (i.e., sort by Artist and then by Year)? I expect the proliferation of "ties" would drive me nuts, because there are of course a lot more artists than there are years of recorded music. But that's why user options are a good thing.

[gerph]

Thanks for the pointer to the bug. It's interesting to see an issue raised in the Jive context linked back to a bug that was opened in 2003.

Are you saying you prefer to sort only (ie, globally) on Year, as opposed to my preference of Artist / Year (i.e., sort by Artist and then by Year)? I expect the proliferation of "ties" would drive me nuts, because there are of course a lot more artists than there are years of recorded music. But that's why user options are a good thing.

That's right, yes; I prefer the global sort without an extra menu in there - which would just be irritating to me. For example, I couldn't say whether Script For A Jester's Tear was 1980, 1981 or 1982 (actually, it looks like it's 1983). The way that I like to see the list (and the way that I've implemented it) is that the list would be :

Fish's First Practice Session (1981)
Script For A Jester's Tear (1983)
Fugazi (1984)
Real To Reel (1984)
Misplaced Childhood (1985)
Brief Encounter (1986)
...

(which, if you don't know Marillion may mean nothing, but the years on the end give you the idea)

I also prefer that the albums without years get filed at the end, but that's my personal preference and the patch I offered gives you the option of placing the unyeared artists at either end. In the case of multiple albums in the same year, they're sorted alphabetically - this is important to me as I used names such as 'The Thieving Magpie (1)' and 'The Thieving Magpie (2)' to distinguish multi-disc sets.

Sadly, my patch does not appear to affect the menu used on the Jive remote. I couldn't work out where the code path was for the menu it used, so I left it :-( However, this doesn't negate the fact that that bug is the one which relates to people's preferences for sorting albums by year. How it is that people cope without it... I dunno... Guess I (or they) are just odd :-)

[aubuti]

Actually I think we're talking about the same thing. There's no "extra menu" in what I'm talking about. It's a single ("flat") album list, sorted alphabetically by Artist (actually ArtistSort), and then for each Artist, the albums are sorted by Year. If the artist releases two albums in the same year, they are sorted alphabetically by album name. Just like the web ui does. Here's an excerpt from my Albums listing in the current web ui (except for the years in square brackets, which I added manually here for illustration).

Live At Blues Alley by Eva Cassidy [1998]
Songbird by Eva Cassidy [1998]
Bluesmen by Cephas & Wiggins [1993]
Cool Down by Cephas & Wiggins [1995]
Tracy Chapman by Tracy Chapman [1988]
Uh Huh: His Greatest Hits by Ray Charles [1992]
Standards by Ray Charles [1998]
Genius Loves Company by Ray Charles [2004]
The Long Black Veil by The Chieftains [1995]
Unplugged by Eric Clapton [1992]
Chronicles by Eric Clapton [1999]
Workbench Songs by Guy Clark [2006]
The Clash by The Clash [1977]
Give 'Em Enough Rope by The Clash [1978]
London Calling by The Clash [1979]

So in terms of your example, it's not that don't have any albums from 1982 -- you just don't have any Marillon albums from 1982. You're doing a global sort, but not only on year.

Or am I flogging a dead horse here?

[gerph]

We're talking about the same thing in the Artists list; I don't know (OTTOMH) how to make the albums list do what you're asking - I understand what you mean about it.

I actually rarely use the Albums lists because scrolling through and locating anything usefully in a list of over 4000 albums is far more difficult than selecting the artist fisrt (choosing from around 1200 items). On the regular remote you're able to select the letter you're intereested in from the remote. But on Jive it's tedious to scroll through long lists.

Oh. I've just updated Jive and the accelleration branch does appear to have been merged (or whatever it was that they were doing to make acceleration work) and it's pretty useable now.

To return to your original question... I still don't know how to modify the list returned to Jive so that it matches the player menus for sorting things 'properly' :-(