Sort bug

[JeremyP]

I have, say four studio albums by a band, and one live show

Folder/Album named as follows

10. Album 1
20. Album 2
30. Album 3
40. Album 4
1992-07-12 [Venue, City, State or Country)

The above would sort as above in Explorer; the sort is correct; in MediaMonkey, the display is as follows

10. Album 1
1992-07-12 [Venue, City, State or Country)
20. Album 2
30. Album 3
40. Album 4

Spot the error

[nohitter151]

It's not really a bug. MM is using alphabetical sorting while win explorer is using numerical.

[JeremyP]

Hmmm. I beg to disagree. The sort is alphanumeric in Windows, and should be in MediaMonkey. I worked on library systems for 25 years for the likes of Oxford University, and am hence more than familiar with sorting techniques and requirements. Certainly, in a library system - which, after all, is what MediaMonkey is, the sort would be as sorted in Windows.

JP

[Bex]

Actually, windows explorer is not sorting alphanumericly, it's sort order is called "natural sort order". MM is sorting alphanumericly, which gives the order in your second example above.

Anyway, the issue is entered into Mantis (MM's bug tracking system):
http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=6253
Let's hope the developers addresses the issue in the near future.

[JeremyP]

Thanks for that; it is my belief that "natural order" is simply the normalisation of the string (this is done in library system indexes, as well, to deal with case/punctuation, etc). Good to hear that is entered as a bug - it is, and whilst only cosmetic, upsets my orderly mind

[JeremyP]

Simple way to deal with the numeric element is to prefix the numeric element with the number of characters

Hence

10
1920
20
30

sorts to
210
220
230
41920

easy !

[Lowlander]

That changes the number, leading 0's is a better work-around.

[JeremyP]

No - you just strip of the leading digit in any numeric sentence. Ideally, the index is built from each entry but held separately. I imagine MM is sql based? Regardless, you store the normalised form for indexing, and then the data as well. Oh the indexes I have built...