Basic error in numerical sorting of album names

[Andre Gosselin]

(15-01-2014 20:47)winxi Wrote:  I've posted a tutorial in this thread on how to automatically create custom sort tags to get the desired sort order. The note at the bottom on how to remove existing leading zeros may be especially of interest for Andre.

This tutorial will certainly prove very helpful for an easy use of the "customsort tag" offered by MinimServer, and its author should be thanked for taking time to put it up.

After many trials, I came to the conclusion that, for me, the best way to manage movements of a composer works and manage a catalogue of those works was to create an m3u playlist for each work by a given performer/ensemble, and place this playlist inside a folder hierarchy rooted at the composer name. To give a concrete example, I have a main folder "Playlists" where one could find :

Code:

Playlists\
    (...)
    Bach, J.S.\
      (...)
      Cantatas\
        Bach J.S. BWV 0001 - Cantata "<name>" - Koopman, Amsterdam Baroque Choir & Orchestra.m3u
        Bach J.S. BWV 0001 - Cantata "<name>" - Suzuki, Bach Collegium Japan.m3u
        etc...
      (...)
      Clavier Works - Preludes & Fugues\
        BACH J.S. BWV 0903 - Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor - Hewitt.m3u
        BACH J.S. BWV 0903 - Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor - Pinnock.m3u
        etc...

MinimServer is unique among all music servers I tried in that it makes possible the browsing of a hierarchy of nested folders holding playlists through the [folder view]. MinimServer is also amazingly fast at doing so. For those interested, I currently have 10,000 distinct playlists organized into 750 directories under my root 'Playlists' directory.

Playlists names are modeled after the work titles, and so embed work numbers. MinimServer currently sorts the playlists names similarly to the Album tag values, and the same issue is encountered here regarding embedded numbers. As you can see in the examples above, leading 0's have been used inside playlists names to obtain a correct sort (spaces could also be used as bbrip suggested, but they are harder to maintain because they are not visible). Because we are dealing here with playlists and not Album tags, the "customsort tag" technique cannot apply, unfortunately.

I think that, if a change in the sorting algorithm is envisioned in MinimServer for the Album tag, it should also be for playlists names. In fact, it should be for every place where a work number could appear.

Playlists names are just file names with the extension removed, and the sad fact is that, under Windows, the file names would correctly sort without the leading 0's in the work numbers. Similarly under Linux, if directory contents is listed using "ls -v" command. With this in mind, I risk the following suggestion :
Implement an option applicable to browsing the [folder view], allowing the user to either use the current sort technique, or sort using the underlying OS commands known to "generally" produce what is for some a more "natural" sort order (eg "ls -v" on Linux, default directory listing on Windows). Minimserver could run this command in the background, and pipe its output in place of what the current sort procedure generates. (I am guessing a bit here, but I used this technique a lot when I was programming in the Python language). Of course, in doing so, a user must be ready to accept whatever nasty results this may produce in some circumstances.

Because the folder view is just a way to look the OS directory structure, I think it would be acceptable to allow recourse to some OS specific internals to generate a directory listing. For an example along the same line, some characters are not allowed inside filenames on Windows (colons for ex.), but they are on Linux. Consequently, the OS requirements must be taken into account when playlists are named.

I understand that this suggestion does not apply to the album tags sorting issue, but it could certainly alleviate the similar playlist sorting issue.

Regards