"Sort by year" option doesn't work as expected

[Ben Cordes]

Binary package hint: banshee

Preferences > Source Specific > Music > Miscellaneous > Sort an artist's albums by year, not title

What this actually does is change the sorting of the song pane so that it sorts all of an artist's SONGS by year instead of by album title. It does not, for instance, change the sorting of the album pane (which always sorts by album title regardless of the position of this setting). Also, if one of the artist's albums is a "Greatest Hits" collection where each track on the album has a different year in the ID3, then the songs on that album are sorted by year (not by album order) and interspersed with other albums.

Admittedly, figuring out where to sort a Greatest Hits album if you're trying to sort albums-by-year is not a trivial problem and I'm not sure what the answer ought to be. But wherever it gets sorted in the song pane (year of first song maybe?), all of the songs should be sorted together, and they should be sorted in album order.

Otherwise, you could rename the option header to be "Sort an artist's songs by year, not by album title". Which wouldn't do what I want it to do, but at least it wouldn't be misleading.

[Ben Cordes (cordes-ben)]

Forgot the version information: Banshee 2.0.0, straight out of Natty.

[Alfe (alfeberlin)]

I can confirm the bug.

Please do not just change the description ;-) If you have lots of albums from a band with several decades of history, it makes much more sense to sort them by year as this will group the various phases of a band (e. g. when which band members participated). The current situation where the album covers are always sorted by their name is not a good solution.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

maybe this issue could be related to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544758

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Still a problem in Oneiric. Main issue is that it doesn't even sort the albums pane.

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