"Recent" sorting

[tarnkappe]

For the most recent album directory I thought about how the criteria should be to find which albums/tracks are the most recent ones.

First the question: What should the "most recent" directory shoud look like? A list of Artists, Albums or a list of tracks? Probably a hierarchical view would be the best: Artist/Album/Tracks? This requires a correct tagging of the music files, but this is ok, I think, at least I do not have an idea how to present a "most recent" list in folder view.

Now the question is how to find the most recent tracks. Simon suggested the timestamp of a file when it was added to the minimserver library for the first time. So you can change the meta data without pushing the file to the top of most recent list again, as long as the path and filename is kept the same. The problem is that I name the Artist/Album/Track filenames the same as the titles in the meta data. So changing the meta data would often lead to a new "most recent" file. Also when scanning a music directory for the first time, all tracks inside this directory would be listed add recently added, even if the albums are very old in the collection.

I think a better approach would be to find the *minimum* (oldest) date of the following dates:
a) file creation time (file modification time is not of interest as it will be always younger than the creation date, right?)
b) the datetime when the track was added to the minimserver library for the first time

Now if you modify a file, e.g. cutting a hidden track from the last track of an album and copying the two new created files back into the album folder, this would lead to a new "most recent" entry, because of the newly separated hidden track. But the album is still an old one. So it might be an idea to collect all of the datetime values a) and b) of all tracks of one album and find the oldest datetime value of these. This datetime is then tagged to all tracks of this album.

With this strategy an album would only show up in the most recent list if all the tracks are recently created and added.