bug report - custom grouping schemes

have 9.5 beta 4 with Facets 2007_11_20. Initially installed into a different directory than the previous 9.4 version was in so this is unlikely to be due to a conflict with older components.
Only additional components are Facets and Quick Tagger.

Have UI Elements for both Facets and AlbumList added so get the same issues with both components in the Playlist Viewer. I am unable to get the Custom Groups feature to work in most cases. Even uncomplicated sorts as simple as:

%album artist% - %title%
%album% - left(tracknum,2)

will not usually work. I've tried to remove the '-', tried ';', '|', but nothing works consistently.

Interestingly, the built-in Groups such as Artist / Date / Album usuallly work with AlbumList but usually do not work with Facets. My Custom Groups do not work with either one. I did try a very basic %album artist% Grouping which worked with AlbumList but not with Facets.

I can sort by the column headings so I know that these compound sorts should work but can not sort by any simple combination of Custom Group values.
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Other than the groupings issue, every thing else works great. Thanks for a great upgrade.

First, welcome to the forum!

Can you be more specific?
What do you mean by "not working"?
Also, what Facets have to do with grouping in the playlist view?

I do not mean to offend you, I'm just a bit confused…

Have you tried to use Sort by ... in the playlist and set your custom sort string?
Everything works fine in my foobar.

But maybe, I didn't understand your point

Sorry if I was unclear:

Whether someone uses playlist manager, Facets or AlbumList windows, the selected music files are displayed in the "PlayList View" UI Element. If you <right click> anywhere on the titlebar within the "PlayList View" window, there is a dropdown menu that displays: columns & groups. Columns & groups also can be displayed if the "layout editing mode" is selected and you <right click> in the PlayList view window too. Therefore my problems are with the PlayList View window when using Custom Groups. I have not had any problems with Custom Columns

Groups shows the "Custom Grouping Schemes" that people add in the Playlist View properties (which is under Foobar Properties -> Display -> Default User Interface -> PlayList View -> Custom Grouping Schemes.

The defaults that are already in there for:
"By Artist/Date/Album"
"By Artist/Date/Album/Codec"
"By Artist"
seem to work fine whether I pick an item through PlayList Manager or AlbumList UI Elements, but not with Facets. For some reason, simple sorting within the "PlayList view" window when the files are picked through Facets doesn't seem to sort by the selected grouping when I use even the built-in "Groups" options.

On the other hand, I have had a hard time getting the Custom Groups to sort properly when I use more than 1 sort fields with any of the 3 ways I have tried to pick the music files from PlayList Manager, Facets, or with AlbumList. You may be correct that I may have the syntax wrong. I could not find the "Sort By" option you mentioned either by right clicking on "Playlist View" window or by looking in the Foobar Preference options so maybe this goes by a different name or I don't know where to look. However, I when I just tried something simple like
%album artist% %title% or %albumartist% - %title%,
the PlayList view window did not sort alphabetically by artist & song title.

I just tried a simple Custom Group of %title% only and this didn't Group alphabetically by song title so there may be something wrong with the way title sorting is working since this does sort alphabetically when I use %albumartist%. I manually clicked on the "title" column, and the songs do sort properly so there is no problem with the music files.

Thanks for your response.

Preferences -> Media Library -> Facets

uncheck "Create always-sorted autoplaylists"

OK, I do it this way.

Custom Grouping is set to
%album artist%—%album%[, $substr(%copyright%,1,4)]

In the next screenshot, I used Facets to add three different albums by The Hilliard Ensemble. Then I right-clicked the selection in the playlist view, pointed to "Sort" and left clicked the "Sort by ..." item. In the following dialog I entered
%ALBUM ARTIST% - $substr(%COPYRIGHT%,1,4) - %ALBUM% - %DISCNUMBER% - %TRACKNUMBER% - %TITLE%



After that, I have the three albums sorted by the date in the copyright tag (1987, 1989 and 2004):



Hope that's what you're asking for.

Cheers



That's under Preferences -> Media Library -> Album list, not in the Facets prefs

Oops, it all made sense in my out-of-date world...

but I see the option I spoke of was removed from the mentioned version.

thanks for the correction!

It would be great if you could illustrate your problem with screenshots.

Maybe this bit of information helps:

When sending items to playlists, Facets applies the sorting pattern defined at Preferences, General, Sort incoming files by.

Please do also note that sorting and grouping in the playlist view are not correlated. Grouping does not change the order of the playlist, but compares the grouping pattern for each pair of consecutive tracks, and inserts a group header if they are different.

This for example means that if you sort by tracknumber and group by artist/date/album, the playlist will look like this:

Artist1 - [Date1] Album1
01
Artist2 - [Date2] Album2
01
Artist3 - [Date3] Album3
01
Artist1 - [Date1] Album1
02
Artist2 - [Date2] Album2
02
Artist3 - [Date3] Album3
02
Artist1 - [Date1] Album1
03

...and so on, and not like this:

Artist1 - [Date1] Album1
01
02
03
Artist2 - [Date2] Album2
01
02
Artist3 - [Date3] Album3
01
02

Thanks for the explanation of the difference between Group vs Sort. Since I was expecting the Group button to Sort, your explanation explains what I was seeing. I still need to figure out how to sort and I don't see the same thing shown in the screenshots above:

In the screenshot shown by eevan, the first few options in his popup show:
Remove
Crop
Sort
Cut
Copy

However, when I <right click> in the Playlist window, I see
Play
Remove
Crop
Cut
Copy
There is no Sort option. I also don't have Run, Run Command, Send To Device that he has at the bottom of his list. The rest of the options I have are the same as his list.

I installed Foobar v 9.5 beta4 in its own directory so there were no carryover dlls. Am I missing a dll in the default install or am I missing an option under Foobar preferences. The only additional dlls I added were Facets and Quick Tagger. Is there another dll that allows sorting of the playlist window. If eavan was using an add-on, is there anything on the "new features requested" list for doing this with saved sorting options.

This is only my 3rd post. Since you mentioned that I might need to send screen shots, can you tell me what program people use for taking screen shots which I can insert in my messages.

Thanks for all of your help. I've been using Foobar for years with multiple add-ons. This new version lets me do everything I used to do with a much easier setup without add-ons.

It's only available if you select multiple tracks - and this special sorting commands only sorts the selected tracks.

To sort the whole playlist, either select all tracks (Ctrl+A), or use the Edit, Sort submenus in the main menu.


See this Microsoft guide. Save the image as a PNG file.

Then upload it to one of the free image hosts like TinyPic, and paste the "IMG Code for Forums & Message Boards" into your post.

Thanks for all of your help Frank. I was missing the first step to "Select All". It's also nice that the drop down box already saves the previous "Sorts". It would be nice if a future feature in Foobar would allow the editing of these "Sorts" under Foobar preferences.

I appreciate all of your help. You had a lot of people keep asking about ratings so I uploaded a Guide to help cut down some of these forum questions for you.

Hmm I'm having a related problem? I think:

I'm using eejax's default theme with standard settings. I've added music from my ipod by setting the music library dir to F:\, which works fine, and it uses Facets UI along with playlist view.

However! When I click on an artist in the Artist facet, the tracks then displayed in the Playlist View seem to be very strangely sorted, and I'm not sure why - each time to fix this I have to select all, and sort by... then press okay for the default sort "%ALBUM ARTIST% - %DATE% - %ALBUM% - %DISCNUMBER% - %TRACKNUMBER% - %TITLE%" which displays things as I want them:

Artist - Album 1
track 1 - title
track 2 - title

Artist - Album 2
track 1 - title
etc...

Initially it looks like this (click for pic) which is very weird -- I can't understand what sorting scheme it's using there. Is there any way to fix this, or to do an automatic sort each time?

Thanks in advance

How about actually reading the thread you reply to?


It is also mentioned in the manual.

Sorry - I thought I had read the whole thing, but I must have missed that line . Thanks for helping me anyway mate - it works fine now.

I guess the default %path_sort% was to blame because itunes stores things in a lot of different folders, so I've replaced that with the default 'sort by' value.