First, thanks, guys, for adding the support for allowing me to sort my playlists how I want instead of strict alphabetical order. Now I can have my ``The Who'' back instead of just ``Who''.

I'm new to the 2.0 ballgame, so this might be obvious, but folks have been talking about the Soup views. Is this implemented in the player yet? If so, where is it? (These questions are related; wait for it!)

What I'm concerned with is when the Soup views are implemented in the player, are they going to be sorted strictly alphabetically? Or can I control the ordering?

Soup views are not yet implemented in the player.

Now that you can order your playlists the way you like them, why do you care about the order of the soup items (whenever they get implemented)? You can create playlists and order them however you like. Just ignore the soup views at that point.

[In a Homer Simpson voice]

Mmmmm....Alphabet Soup....

LOL

I know. It would just be nice if they worked ``correctly''. That way I wouldn't have to bother with playlists, and it would force me to tag my music properly.

I don't think soup views will ever replace my use of playlists. They're what I will consider an alternate browsing method. In that vein, I hope some serious filtering is done when presenting them. The filtering should take into account words like "The," "A," and special characters like braces. I'd like these to be ignored when sorting, so that tracks end up where you'd expect them (at least where I would prefer them :)

If this were rule-based and we could somehow configure the rules, I'd go so far as to give letter assignments to numbers as well. So that "5440" would appear along with the "F's" :)

Bruno

After various experiences with sorting and cataloguing my music collection, I've ended up following the type of rules they use in a music store.

I always put "The" at the end of the artist name, such as "Beatles, The" or "Crystal Method, The". After all, if you're trying to look up "The Beatles", you'd naturally want to go to "B" and not to "T". When it comes to special characters, that's probably your discretion. With something like " 'N Sync ", which has the ' char at the beginning, you'd probably just do it as "N Sync", so you could find them under "N".

Overall, my advice is to sort and label your music any way that makes it the easiest for you to find it later.

I've named all my playlists the same way. I also put the year before the album names to make them come up in the proper order. However, with the new playlist ordering this won't be necessary anymore.

BUT, within a track's ID3 data I don't do this type of name changing. If the band is The Beatles, then the artist ID3 tag reads "The Beatles"

And as far as 'N Sync goes, I'd just delete any of those tracks - problem solved. :)

ID3 tag data serves a primarily a display purpose for me. So therefore I keep things entered in the tags the way I want to see them displayed. There are a number of products which do title parsing for ignoring things like "The" and preceding punctuation. These are what make the difference between creative engineering and simply relying on a slightly modified ASCII sort (it would suck to have lower-case letters sorted after the full range of caps, wouldn't it? :)

Bruno

The car player search function already does this, and I believe the soup views on the HSX109 so as well.

Rob

In the car search modes, things like punctuation and symbols like brace still come before the letters. And I believe anything with "The" still gets displayed in the T's.

Of course when you actually enter search characters, you do get what you want. So for instance, typing "CHA" on the remote will cause a match on "The Charlatans"

With soup views it would be nice to get the filtering done real-time for when scrolling through the lists.

Bruno

Better than getting the filtering done real-time would be to not have filtering at all, but rather to add explicit sort keys for the artist, album, and song title fields (this is, as some of you may know, a feature I desperately want to see - as in this post :). They're in the ID3v2.4 standard, and they'd be a great addition to the Empeg's metadata. This way, for each of the fields you'd be able to have a sort key that is used to order it in the soup views. This lets you do things like setting the key for "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The", which the Empeg software partially deals with now, but also lets you do things like setting the key for "Peter Gabriel" to "Gabriel, Peter", which the software currently doesn't even attempt to deal with (for good reason).

Of course, I'd be shocked to see this happen in time for 2.0 (also for good reason) - but one never knows, I guess, given that a major new feature (the Info: Seek mode) somehow snuck into beta 7. It'd be a great thing to see in some later version though, and would be useful for the HSX109 and the Rio Receiver as well.

Better than getting the filtering done real-time would be to not have filtering at all, but rather to add explicit sort keys for the artist, album, and song title fields

This was another idea I was also thinking of. I was avoiding mentioning it because I thought no one else would be keen on creating some non-standard approach to this. However, if an established ID3 tag already exists for this purpose, I think support in the player would be an excellent idea. Of course it involves extending the database structure to include this additional field.

And to properly use this ability it would be nice to have a tool to populate it with the correct data. Some scripting or regular expressions should be able to handle this.

Bruno

In the car search modes, things like punctuation and symbols like brace still come before the letters. And I believe anything with "The" still gets displayed in the T's.

Of course when you actually enter search characters, you do get what you want. So for instance, typing "CHA" on the remote will cause a match on "The Charlatans"

Er, that's the way I like it: display titles/sources/artists as they have been entered, ignore case, punctuation, spaces and articles on search.

What I would like to add is an option to search for substring, so that I could search for either 'Peter' or 'Gabriel' and match both 'Peter Gabriel' and 'Gabriel, Peter'.

Sorting is another question, and I think dmz is right here with his wish for separate (optional) sort keys.

This lets you do things like setting the key for "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The", which the Empeg software partially deals with now, but also lets you do things like setting the key for "Peter Gabriel" to "Gabriel, Peter", which the software currently doesn't even attempt to deal with (for good reason).

An old, discontinued, but unsurpassed CD player and manager DiscPlay4 from Obvion employs somewhat simplistic, but very useful trick: the user is supposed to enter author's name in the normal 'first_name last_name' order, but if you check 'sort by last name' checkbox it will sort them by the last word of the name (which usually is surname).

Separate search key is better, of course, but this trick could be used to guess its initial value.

sorry but having heard this term over and over i have to ask ... what's a soup view?

Soup views are 'pseudo-playlists' generated from tag data (everything in 2.xx emplode lefthend panel bellow 'Playlists' folder). Currently they include lists by artist, album, genre, year and flat list of all tracks. One can imagine others (and perhaps there will be others). It is also possible to generate temporary lists from search results.

At the moment 'soup views' exist only in emplode, not the player itself; so, they are usefull only for cleaning up tags, detecting duplicates etc. Idea is to eventually use them to select music for playing, as replacement for 'manual' artist, genre etc. playlists (so that users would only make mood, his/hers, low/hi key, test, demo etc. playlists).

Guess I better put that one in the FAQ.