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

[Donagh Horgan <donagh horgan gmail com>]

Hi Gabriel,

Thanks for the quick reply - and apologies for not replying so promptly myself! I've been working on this in my spare time over the last few weeks, and I finally have something that works (for me, anyway). I've written a perl script to scan through my Banshee library and change the sort album fields so albums are now displayed chronologically instead of alphabetically on my ipod (I tried writing a Banshee extension, but I'm just not up to the coding unfortunately). I guess this will work for other devices that support the Sort Album tag, but I haven't been able to test it.

Along the way, I found myself implementing a few more features I'd like to see in Banshee but don't have the technical know-how to implement, such as:

• Finding duplicate tracks
• Finding and/or removing invalid entries in CoreAlbums (sometimes this happens to my library, although probably through my own impatience than anything else)
  
• Backing up the Banshee database (just a simple copy-paste job)

I'm also working on a feature to change the sort field (not the actual artist name) for artist names that begin with "The" (e.g. "The Who" to "Who, The") - it bugs me that the browser in Banshee sorts them under T. If anyone else is as pedantic as me, you can find the source at https://gitorious.org/bansheetoolkit. I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions!

Happy sorting,
Donagh

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 20:22, Gabriel Burt <gabriel burt gmail com> wrote:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/tree/src/Core/Banshee.Services/Banshee.Database/SortKeyUpdater.cs#n70
shows how TitleSortKey is generated from TitleSort (falling back to
Title and then to "Unknown Album").  To have this bit of code run,
you'd need to clear your SortKeyLocale: "delete from CoreConfiguration
where key='SortKeyLocale'" should do it.

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Donagh Horgan <donagh horgan gmail com> wrote:
> 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

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