Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] sort by year

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin wh9 net>]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 10:10:18PM -0500, Andrew Conkling wrote:
> On 3/4/07, Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin wh9 net> wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 06:53:51PM +0100, nicola di maria wrote:
> > > I think we need the possibility to sort by year albums
> > > like this
> > > http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m224/nicoladimaria/Schermata-1.png
> >
> > This really doesn't describe what you're asking for.  Perhaps you could
> > describe the difference between what you want and what you currently get
> > by clicking on the 'year' column?
> 
> It made sense to me, but only because I've thought of this before. In
> the browser, rather than sorting the albums alphabetically, it's often
> useful to sort them chronologically. I think that's what Nicola is
> suggesting.

OK, that makes sense.

As I see it, the there are two barriers to implementing this:
 * sorting on a value that isn't visible seems like a pretty bad idea
 * there's no immediate way to control the sort order

We could probably solve this by changing the album browser from this:

  [album]
  all 3 albums (37)
  aaaa (14)
  bbbb (11)
  cccc (12)

to this:

  [album  v]         [year]    [count]
  all 3 albums                     37
  aaaa                2011         14
  bbbb                1963         11
  cccc                1998         12

which would provide sorting on name, year, and song count:

  [album]         [year  v]   [count]
  all 3 albums                     37
  bbbb                1963         11
  cccc                1998         12
  aaaa                2011         14

etc.

Having the other property views (artist, genre, other things in other
sources) sortable by song count would also be nice.

The main problem left is that albums don't actually exist in rhythmbox,
so there's no good way to associate years with them.  This is something
that we intend to fix, although no one has done any work on it as far as
I know.