Hello,
FIles are named : {artist} - {album} - {tracknr} - {title}
set autosort import on field tracknr.
Won't work! WHY??? Position is still by alphabetical sort of title, and soup playlists are by alphabetical sort of title...NOT track number. jeesh this has been frustrating.

Keep in mind that the FIELD tracknumber is different than having the track number in the file name. Are the files properly tagged with the correct track number in the ID3 V1 and V2 tag fields? Or is it just in the file names?

If it's just in the file names, either tag the MP3s properly, or turn off the feature that tries to sort by the fields, that's what's screwing you up.

IIRC soup playlists are always in title order. The autosort field applies to normal playlists. It's a long story.

Right, but he said:

Quote:
Position is still by alphabetical sort of title

I assumed he meant "position" in a regular playlist that he'd created, separate from soups.

mschrag,

soups without track order numbering? that is unmerciful.

woops.

It appears that almost all the code is there to allow soups sorted on tags other than title, it's just not hooked up at the highest layers (and obviously not tested). Obviously I had big plans at one point ...

So, I worked around this by going back to EMPLODE after generating the soups in JEMPLODE and recursively sorting the tracks by the tracknumber field.

Good Luck,
-Ted

So are these soup playlists that were created with jEmplode or just regular playlists? If they're soups, you may cause all kinds of weird problems for jEmplode (you may find that you start to get duplicates in your soups or things out of order). jEmplode depends on the known soup sort order (it uses a binary search to see if soups already contain each tune, so if it's out of its expected order, all bets are off). I've never actually TESTED what happens, but buyer beware on that one. Alternatively you can unattach the soup so it's not updated anymore (delete the "soup" tag from the advanced tags menu and resync)

Hey Mike..
FYI: It's been working for me for a while (ever since the new EMPLODE came out that allows for recursive sorting).

Although, maybe it might explain why my soups wont auto-update when I add new music. Usually, I end up deleting and re-creating the soup in JEMPLODE after adding the new tunes, and re-sorting them in EMPLODE. Havent really seen any duplicates or other side effects.. but that's not to say they're not there.

-Ted

I do exactly as TedP describes to workaround the lack of track number sorting with soups in jEmplode. As mschrag indicates jEmplode doesn't like this much which results in soup tracks being duplicated.

To workaround this I just completely delete and recreate my soups each time I add tracks. It's a time-consuming pain to have to do this and forces me to batch up a lot of tracks before uploading to my empeg to make the ordeal worthwhile.

I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount to have the "sort by track number in soups" code enabled.

hmmm.. i'm using jemplode 5.2. maybe on 6.0 it no longer works?? i'll have to mess around with it. i would certainly like a tracknumber sort as well, but we should be lucky that mike has done all he has with the current software.

cheers
ted

My solution was to put the number (in two digits) in front of the title in the id3tag title as well as the filename when I ripped the CD. Once I did that, I never had a problem with order again. A nice little perl/shell script can do that recursively quite easily and effectively.

Yeah, but it looks terrible, and you shouldn't have to do that. All software should just Do The Right Thing with track number ordering all the time.

The whole concept of playing songs alphabetically is just awful.

Sure there is. If you pick an artist, the songs should be chronological (albums by year, then tracks by track). If you pick a genre, it should be alphabetical by artist, then chronological (by year then by track) within each artist.

Now that's very bold to claim that is the "right" way [edit: I realize 5seconds after posting that I was rather snippy sounding here when you quite possibly were offering a "reasonable natural ordering" rather than stating that this was the "right" ordering -- sorry tfabris ]... I would much prefer albums sorted by title under an artist. And the same under Genre -- Alpha by artist, then Alpha by Album, then by Track. I couldn't care less about release year. This is of course my personal opinion, but it illustrates my point. There is no univerally "correct" sort order except within an album, where track number is an explicit ordering defined by the artist. My real point here is that jEmplode needs configurable per-soup-layer-sort-order. So when you make a soup layer, every layer asks you what tag you want to sort by.

One other interesting thing to note is that the only tag guaranteed to be filled in is title, so if people don't fill in track #'s and the default is to order tracks by # by default, they're kind of out of luck. I don't know if this is actually a COMMON problem or not, just an interesting thing to note ..

Go Mike!

Yippppee!! Most excellent!! It's good to come back to the boards every once in a while

2 questions though
You were right about the dups.. Is there any way to systematically get rid of them from the EMPEG? I deleted all the soups, and was hoping they would show up as unattached items, but they're in there.

Also, when I did a soup with the first letter of the artist sorted by artist, I got a weird sort of the letter "T" presumably because of a "The" in the title. Check it out (enclosed screendump).

Thanks again for the awsome contribution!
Cheers
-Ted

The dupes should only exist inside of soups, so I would think deleting the soups would delete the dupes (that is, the tunes aren't duped, just dupe references in a playlist). What exactly are you seeing?

As far the sorting .. That makes my head hurt trying to figure out what's going on there and how to fix it. What a bizarre artifact of The-removal ...

So that's interesting -- I imagine soups have always been slightly screwed with respect to The's then? That is, The Beetles has been in a top level artist first level of "T" rather than a proper folder of "B".

OK this will be fixed in 63

Hey Mike...

So there were actual duplicates... (they showed up as "tunes"), even after I deleted the soups. Turns out they had refs=0, so I just added the refs column, sorted by refs and deleted all refs=0. That worked like a champ.

Cheers
-Ted

Duplicate tunes is definitely weird ... I'm not entirely sure how that could happen. Have you imported songs prior to the calculation of RID's? If so then that might explain it. With RID's now, it should be very rare that you get duplicates of the same exact file with two different FID's. Oh well ... If you can get this to happen again, let me know and we can take a look at the actual files.

That must be it. I think I originally uploaded tunes with EMPLODE. I just did a clean re-upload of everything overnight using JEMPLODE, so I should be good to go from now on.

Thanks for the inputs.
-Ted