Sorting, sorting, more sorting

Posted on Feb 2nd 2010 by pieceofsummer.

Just to make things clear.

All future releases of foo_touchremote will use the following sort rules:
1. Inside single album view songs are ordered by song number. Songs without song number would come before the others in alphabetical order.
2. In all other places (search results, all albums view, all tracks) songs are ordered alphabetically despite song number, album and other fields.
That’s all. It is what Remote expects from server.

The only question is how to treat non-letter characters (numbers, special symbols) when sorting. Should they prepend latin letters or come after them (like iTunes does)?
And what to do with non-latin letters? The options are to use navigation letters and let all non-latin characters appear as ‘#’, or just keep it as is without any letters at all.

Wanna to hear what you think of all that things.

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 comments

  1. Patrick on February 2nd, 2010 at 04:50

    “Should they prepend latin letters or come after them”
    - Non latin letters and numbers should come at the end of the list.

    “The options are to use navigation letters and let all non-latin characters appear as ‘#’,”
    - I think if they all appear as “#” it would be fine. I definitely think it would be nice to have letters there.

    My 2 cents,
    Patrick

  2. Juan on February 2nd, 2010 at 13:26

    Im same as Patrick for the two things: Non latin and numbers go at the end and also having letters at the side of the list would be great.

    Thanks!

  3. Urs on February 2nd, 2010 at 15:12

    How to treat non-letter characters?

    I agree with your suggestion and the previous comments, i.e.:
    Non-latin letters and numbers should come at the end of the list

    Shortcut letters: what to do with non-latin letters?

    Maybe a two level process can be implemented:

    1. Assign a latin letter whenever possible to the non-latin letter.
    Example: any of {Ä, Â, À, Å} is mapped to A.
    This means an artist starting with Å would appear below the shortcut letter A.

    2. If a non-latin letter cannot be mapped, put it into the # basket.

    I think, if you would separate the mapping rules from the code, it would be easy to maintain. You could take the mapping rules from here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin-1_Supplement_Unicode_block

  4. Patrick on February 2nd, 2010 at 18:50

    no offense Urs but those are all latin letters.

  5. Urs on February 2nd, 2010 at 19:09

    Ooops, thanks Patrick… that was a bit embarassing.

  6. DITC on February 4th, 2010 at 01:42

    Hi,

    I am experiencing some problems with connection to foobar.
    I am able to pair the iphone and see in the console that foobar recognizes my iphone. In the remote app it always says connecting to library but it doesn’t load the library. With Itunes this is no problem.
    Here is my console output:
    TouchRemote: items added to library: 1878
    start
    finished in: 0:00.125
    426 artists in the tree
    493 albums in the tree
    1816 tracks in the tree
    41 genres in the tree
    5 composers in the tree
    Watching: C:\Music
    Album List refreshed in: 0:00.241450
    TouchRemote: init started
    TouchRemote: this is a first use
    TouchRemote: assigned ID ‘96DDB1E3-1D45-4D79-9612-4FF1A76068C0′
    TouchRemote: started DAAP server on port 3690
    Startup time : 0:02.105843
    TouchRemote: found device ‘Markuss-iPhone.local.’
    TouchRemote: address resolved as ‘192.168.178.22′
    TouchRemote: login accepted, session id = 757836271

    Any idea what this could be? As Itunes is able to connect to the iphone via WLAN the ports shouldn’t be a problem or?

  7. pieceofsummer on February 4th, 2010 at 04:01

    Cannot say exactly why that connectivity problem exists, it just happens sometimes. This is definitely not ports issue (since login is detected and accepted). Most likely there’s something wrong with server replies. Switching iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection off and back on usually helps.

    I’ll keep digging…

  8. Jalla on February 4th, 2010 at 22:10

    It seems to always sort by track name for my part. If I choose an artist in the artist screen, then choose an album the songs are not sorted by their track number. The same happens if I search for an artist, select that artist and then select a certain album, the songs are not sorted by their track name. Is it supposed to be like that? If so I can’t say I like it. When I select an album I prefer to have the album sorted by the track number, not the track name.

    This is an awesome plug-in btw! Thanks a lot for putting in the effort!

  9. Patrick on February 5th, 2010 at 03:56

    Jalla,

    I dont mean to be a jerk BUT, read the top of the page and maybe a few posts before reporting that which is clearly known.

    POS is working on it. That is stated in more than one place.

  10. Juan on February 5th, 2010 at 12:26

    I simply cant connect anymore, same as DITC I can pair the devices (ipod or iphone) but i get stuck in the library loading process. same computer and same devices give no prob with itunes.
    Any help appreciated

Leave a Reply