Sort songs from an artist by "year - album - track number"

Feature requests
1

Feature description:

Adding an option to sort tracks from an artist by year - album - track number
There are two ways to achieve it, imo:

  1. You add this specific sorting option
  2. You add a custom sort option, where the user can input things that have priority. For example, you can do that on foobar2000: https://i.imgur.com/0KGrbli.png

Problem solved:

Technically not a problem.

Brought benefits:

I think it’s a very natural way of sorting songs. It’s especially useful when you want to listen to an artist’s full discography, in chronological order.

Other application solutions:

 
Lots of applications sort songs like this by default, and then you can change if it’s in ascending or descending order.
Otherwise, you can see how it works in foobar (see above)
 

2

That would not do what you think for albums with songs spanning multiple years like a compilation.

The album would be split if there’s other albums in the years between the span.

3

Fair point, that’s what I don’t tag compilations with different dates. Still, it’s an edge case imo. So you don’t consider implementing this?

4

I’m not fully decided but yes I probably won’t.

1 Like
5

Hi, I’d just like to express my support for this feature. If an album is split because of different year tags then I think that is actually appropriate behaviour. You could think of it as, this view allows seeing songs released by an artist in chronological order. This is a critical way I navigate my music, and I would really love this feature to be implemented so I could buy and use Symphonium full time!

Thank you for the app :).

1 Like
6

This will not be the case for artists who released more than one album in a year. Then it is pure chance that the album released first also comes first in the alphabet.

But if you want to listen to an artist this way, you can already go to the artist page, then “albums”, then sort by year (or, if tagged that way, by release date, which might actually sort albums released within one year correctly), and then hit play in the top bar - or not?

8

Thanks for the info about the ‘Release Date’ sort, I hadn’t noticed that. That indeed is the preferable one to use over ‘Year’ for this feature request.

Your suggestion still doesn’t fufill the use case though - it does not include songs that are by the artist but not on an artist’s own album (eg. compilations, remixes). It also does not allow for browsing by song in release order.

9

release date and original release date are album related so also does not fit your need.

With that said the default year only sort, leads to random sort per year, so I’ll use something like this to improve the default sort, it will still won’t do what you think it will do in most of the case but should mostly work.

2 Likes
10

Yes that’s how I’m playing my music now (going through album list).

Regarding your first point, for these rare situations, usually I add the month to the date so it’s sorted properly, but it’s not ideal since I prefer to have 4 digit dates.