jEmplode 62 is up -- for those who don't mind being total gineau pigs, this one is probably going to have some funky soup issues (you won't lose music or anything, you just might have weirdness in your soups until I work the kinks out) ... I really need to start keeping old versions up there. Didn't think about it until I already uploaded 61. Oh well. So be it

OK, so what this adds is a bunch of fanciness for sorting soups (see the "HELP!! Importing files by track order number in Jemplode 60" in General). The rough overview is that every soup layer now has a "sort by tag" pulldown on it that controls what the sort order will be for everything below that tag. Additionally there is a new layer available called "Tracks Sort Layer." This is really only useful as the very last layer and basically lets you just change the final sort order (without that, the tracks in the last layer would inherit the order of the parent layer).

So for instance, you can now make a soup:

Artists, sorted by Artist
Albums, sorted by Year
Tracks, sorted by Track Number

At least that's the THEORY anyway. Just in case you're curious, a Sorted Tracks layer at the top layer is very similar to a sorted All Layer except that All Layer only incluides type = "tune". That is, if you cared

I'm curious about three major issues:
1) does it work at all -- it appears to work in my test simple cases, but there are a lot of crazy cases for these things

2) does it update properly across several syncs of adding music, modifying tags

3) how dramatically does it affect performance as compared to the previous soups. In the old soups, soup playlists were always sorted by "title", so when hunting for the appropriate nested playlists, I was always searching in the same order of the natural sort, which is a somewhat substantial optimization. In the new way, I can only do that if you are sorted by title, otherwise I have to fall back to a linear search.

Oh yeah, unspecified sort is interpreted as title, so it should behave like it used to -- so if you have old soups, they should continue to work.

ms

[censored] .. Hold for 10 minutes on that one .. I left my test code for the beginnings of local media libraries, so you won't be able to download from your player since it's hardcoded to load from one of my local folders

The censoring is a cute touch ... OK download now.

Hey Mike,

I created my soup playlists over again, and they seem to not refresh at a high level when the tags are changed. Here is an example soup:

Genre and Artist
By Genre, sort by Title
By Artist, sort by Title
By Source, sort by Year

I created this soup in jEmplode 62 and it worked as expected. Now I have a Genre->Artis->Album soup that I wanted, with the Albums sorted by the year. I drilled down into a familiar artist (Radiohead) to see if the Albums were indeed sorted in order of release, and they were. I then discovered that I had ripped one of my albums (Pablo Honey) with an incorrect year of 2002 (when I ripped the album instead of the release date) and promptly changed all of the Year fields to 1993. This did not re-sort my Album listing in the correct order. If I view the Radiohead soup tree, it still lists the year as 2001 when all the songs under it are indeed marked as 1993.

Hmm .. This is actually kind of a tricky one. Playlists adopt the values of the first item put into them and I don't update them. So this is actually of a known issue, but I'll take a look at it.

I see that a unique thread has developed on this.. I had posted this on the original thread, but check out the sorting based on the first letter. "The" seems to confuse the sort.. (screenshot enclosed)

Thanks again for the excellent features!
-Ted

Try this:

Artist and Source
Range - Artist: [,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z, sort by Title
Tag Layer - Artist, sort by Title
Tag Layer - Album, sort by Year

I group some of my letters together like this:

Artist and Source
Range - Artist: [,0-9,a-c,d-f,g-i,j-l,m-o,p-s,t-v,w-z, sort by Title
Tag Layer - Artist, sort by Title
Tag Layer - Album, sort by Year

Range layers will also abide by The-removing collation rules in 63 also, so this will no longer work ...

[Edit: I don't mean that Range layers won't work, but I mean that you can't trick it like you may have been able to in 62]