Say I want to check out my Iron Maiden collection of Albums; I personally prefer to view them in the order of the year released instead of alphabetically.

It would be nice to hit menu>Play...>Artist>Iron Maiden>(option of sorting by year ascending or decending)

Jerz

If it weren't for the fact that the CDDB is so notoriously bad about having the year field filled out at all, I would suggest that sorting albums by year should be the default behavior.

For those who (like me) religiously fill out the year tag and correct all of the other egregious errors in the CDDB tagging, there are two ways to work around this limitaiton if you're willing to do it (I know this is the Wish List thread)...

You could create playlists and have the albums ordered chronologically in the playlist. Hmm, does the Central do hierarchical playlists like the car player? Probably not, I'm guessing...

Okay, then the other way is to add the year to the beginning of the album name. Not particularly pretty, but there you go.

If it weren't for the fact that the CDDB is so notoriously bad about having the year field filled out at all, I would suggest that sorting albums by year should be the default behavior.

That's tempting for studio and live albums, but what about Greatest Hits where each track is tagged with the year it was a single?

Albums don't kill people^W^W have years, tracks have years.

Peter

That's tempting for studio and live albums, but what about Greatest Hits where each track is tagged with the year it was a single?

Well, I'm talking about when you have a group of albums, and having it choose which album to play first. Not how you choose to play tracks within an album.

Agreed that Greatest Hits albums should have their tracks individually year-tagged (and I often go to the trouble of doing that myself by hand), but so far I haven't seen an example of that being the case in the CDDB. For the few compilation albums that are year-tagged, they always seem to be tagged with the compilation's release year.

Because even THAT isn't really the best solution for compilation albums, then you're right, there isn't a proper solution for compilation albums in that scheme.