MMA track order from MM UPnP

[mcow]

I noticed that if I browse by Album Artist, the track order is alphabetical. If I browse by Album, the tracks are in order.

This thread talks about track order and suggests that the client has (or can have, at least) responsibility for the sorting.

Browsing by album and selecting one with multiple discs puts all the Track 1s, then Track 2s, etc.

Browsing by year first doesn't let you view everything in the 70's; and when you select, say, 1972, all the songs are presented in alphabetical order.

BTW: browsing by "Album Artist" is only possible from the 4.07 UPnP server. 4.1 doesn't have "Album Artist," it has "Album Artist and Artist," which is the same thing as Artist. This is not so useful when you've got several dozen Various Artist albums with a bunch of artists that don't appear elsewhere in the library. I seldom if ever want to seek out one of those artists to select, and leaving them out of the list makes the list a lot easier to browse.

[Lowlander]

4.1 doesn't have "Album Artist," it has "Album Artist and Artist," which is the same thing as Artist.

There are 3 options available which you set in the Collection options. You can choose Artist, Album Artist and/or Artist & Album Artist. Artist & Album Artist is not the same as Artist as it also features Album Artists.

[mcow]

BTW: browsing by "Album Artist" is only possible from the 4.07 UPnP server. 4.1 doesn't have "Album Artist," it has "Album Artist and Artist," which is the same thing as Artist.

A-ha: this is configured according to the Media Tree. Now I've got my 4.1 profile configured the same as 4.0.

I noticed that if I browse by Album Artist, the track order is alphabetical. If I browse by Album, the tracks are in order.

The Album Artist order is the same (alphabetical, not numbered) with 4.1 as 4.07.

FWIW, on the Synology NAS server, every folder I've looked at appears in the expected track-number order.


The same multi-disc album I looked at with 4.07, with track number superceding disc number, appears in 4.1 in a different but still unexpected order: tracks from disc 2 first, then disc 1. (Again, Synology does this correctly.)

[mcow]

Artist & Album Artist is not the same as Artist as it also features Album Artists.

Ah, I see. In my case, there are no Album Artists that are not also Artists.

[mcow]

Using UPnPlay on my tablet, it seems that in the hierarchy served up from 4.1, the nodes under Music do not match the nodes I've selected for the collection. I have what I think is the default set of subnodes: Location, Artist & Album Artist, Composer, Album, Genre, Year, Publisher, Rating, Classification. If I use MMA to browse the nodes, they are as expected.

When I browse with UPnPlay under Artist & Album Artist, the order of tracks is showing up partially sorted. So I browsed to an artist with five albums: the tracks appear grouped by album, strictly numeric for four of the albums, no apparent order for the fifth album. (It's easier to determine this with UPnPlay because that program actually shows the track number in the listing. It's OK not to show the number, but it's not OK that the tracks don't appear in order.)

As seen with MMA, the sort order is as expected under every node (grouped by album, ordered by track) with UPnPlay when browsing directly from the NAS's server.


Doing a test-browse now with MMA and the 4.1 server: under Artist & Album Artist, I browse to another artist with five albums. In the listing, I see the five albums at the top; tracks 1-10 of album A, 1-10 of album B, 1-3 of album C (which should have ten) followed by five random tracks from album B, the ten tracks of album A again but in random order, and finally the eleven tracks of album D in random order. None of the ten tracks of Album E appear in the list.

Browsing away and then back to this node again, the display is as desired: all tracks shown, only once, grouped by album, and in track order.

Again, browsing under Album Artist results in alphabetical track listing of all albums.


Other stuff:
I see that UPnPlay presents a Search node (a peer of Music) from 4.1 that is not present with 4.07. It works nicely, lets you search over the important fields; a lot faster than scrolling scrolling scrolling thru the list of albums. I imagine MMA support for this node is not far off.

On the other hand, UPnPlay does not present a Playlists node for either server version. (I do have some playlists shared on each MM server instance.)

[mcow]

I noticed that if I browse by Album Artist, the track order is alphabetical. If I browse by Album, the tracks are in order.

This thread talks about track order and suggests that the client has (or can have, at least) responsibility for the sorting.

Just to be clear, here: if you browse to Album Artist, you see a list with the albums listed first, then all the tracks by that artist -- initially in alphabetical order.
If you visit one of these albums, the tracks for just that album, in alphabetic order, are shown. Exception: if artist has only one album, the tracks are shown in random order; and then when you back out to Album Artist again, the same random order persists.

If you browse to Artist & Album Artist, the list shows the albums, followed by all the tracks in album/track order. But if you visit an Album, the tracks are alphabetical again; and when you back out, tracks are by-album-but-random.

The only way to consistently get a list of the tracks for one album in order is to browse by Album -- but the Albums node shows all 1000+ albums alphabetically, which is too long to browse quickly.

Browsing by album and selecting one with multiple discs puts all the Track 1s, then Track 2s, etc.

This is now sorting with Disc 2 in expected order, followed by Disc 1 in expected order.

[Lowlander]

Build 1620 will have a forced sort (set by developers) when accessing over UPnP instead of the current implementation where it is supposed to use sort set in MMW itself: http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=9867

[mcow]

Thanks for that pointer! Excellent discussion at that bug, I am really looking forward to the next build now.

[mcow]

I'm pretty happy with the sorting implemented in build 1622.