Despite all the great help from this forum, I've managed to make one
stupid mistake in ripping/tagging my collection so I need to decide
what to do. Critical to my decision will be the upcoming <sort albums
by year> feature so I have a few questions (and a suggestion).

First a bit of background. When I'm browsing by artist I want to see
the albums for each artist listed in chronological order. To achieve
this I set the ALBUMSORT tag to things like "Bowie, David, <year>" for
each David Bowie album so that they sort in year order. So far so good
but, like an idiot, I only set the ALBUMSORT tag for artists where I
had more than one of their albums. This now means that when I browse by
album I get neither a list in alphabetic title order (which I would have
got if I hadn't used ALBUMSORT at all) nor a list in artist/year order
(which I would have got if I had set ALBUMSORT on all my albums), what
I get is a useless pretty random mixture of the two of course.

So, I need to fix the above and, with today's features, that means
setting ALBUMSORT for everything. The thing is, if sort by year is
pretty close then I'd prefer to just delete all my ALBUMSORT tags and
wait for the problem to be fixed properly. Before I do that though, I'd
just like to make sure I'm heading in the right direction and understand
what is coming. Specifically.

1) Is sort by year in the beta release yet? If not then any idea when
it will arrive?

2) How exactly will it work? Will there just be a server-wide setting
that if not enabled then, while browsing by artist, albums sort
alphabetically as now but, if set, then albums sort by year?

3) When sort by year is set, what other browsing modes (e.g. browse by
genre, browse by album) will be affected and how? Does it just affect
browse by artist (which is how I hope it works)?

Now, assuming I have it sort of correct as to how it will work, I have
a pretty important request. When sorting by year, please do a textual
sort not a numeric sort. I say this because there are a few artists who
are sufficiently prolific so as to have released more than one album in
the same year and I would like to make sure I have the ability to force
the sort order to be correct on those albums by tagging them "1998a" and
"1998b" or "1998-01" and "1998-12" (for instance). Just doing an ASCII
sort would enable both schemes to work and regular 4 digit years would
still sort correctly of course. A numeric sort would presumeably fail
with my proposed tags because the string to integer convertion would
break when it hits one of my non-numeric characters.

I hope the above makes sense and I'd be grateful for the answers to my
questions.

- Julian


-- 
JulianL
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