[Banshee-List] Chronological album sorting / Banshee database question

[Donagh Horgan <donagh horgan gmail com>]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a script to sort all my albums by year, so that they are displayed in chronological order on my iPod. Previously, when I used iTunes to manage my iPod, I used a script (created by wildmaiden gmail com) that set the Sort Album field of each track to a string in the format "Year AlbumTitle". Thus, on my iPod, each artist's albums are displayed in the order they were released, rather than in the standard alphabetical order (I'm a bit of a pedant when it comes to these things...).

I've created a Perl script to perform the same operation in Banshee, but I've hit a snag: after the TitleSort fields have been changed in the database, I start Banshee and, within a few minutes, the database has reverted to the values present before I ran the script. So, for example, with David Bowie's Low, the script will change the TitleSort field for each track to "1977 Low". I can see this change in the database after running the script, and initially after I start Banshee. However, after a few minutes, the Album Sort field will have reverted to whatever value had been there previously (in this case, to a blank field, but for other tracks, then to whatever string value was present before running the script).

I suspect this behaviour is to do with the relationship between the TitleSort�and TitleSortKey fields in the CoreAlbums table of the Banshee database. Can anyone confirm this and, if so, explain the relationship?

Many thanks,

Donagh Horgan