Sort SPECIFIC Album Alphabetically

[inDe_eD]

EDIT: SOLVED! Check my most recent reply

I've seen a few similar threads when researching before posting, but none of them were exactly the same as my current issue.

I have a pretty large music collection, which includes many unreleased songs from artists I enjoy. I create an 'unreleased' folder for said artists, and since I don't like to leave any tags blank, I tag all unreleased songs as track #1. Everything imports into MusicBee perfectly fine; however, I want the 'unreleased' albums (it's more than okay if I need to go manually fix EACH album) to be sorted ALPHABETICALLY. Currently, they are in some random order, possibly the order they were added to the music library, I'm not sure. It tries to sort by track # just like it does the rest of my albums, but they are all track #1 because of my personal non-legitimate OCD of hating when a file's tag is blank.

Tl;dr: Can I sort SPECIFIC albums in a SPECIFIC manner (alphabetical) and OVERRIDE the current 'sort by track #' default? Or, as my friend suggested, do I gotta get rid of the track #1 tags and deal with having no track numbers?

Here is a screenshot of how things look currently:

[Mayibongwe]

What if you numbered those tracks in their alphabetical order? For example, 2 Piece (feat. Juicy J) being track #1 and Arya/Death Wish/Control(V1) being track #2 and Arya/Death Wish/Control(V2) being track #3 and so on. To do this, you would have to sort those songs according to the Title field (using the Tracks view). That should arrange them in alphabetical order. From there, you would just have to manually input their track numbers- I'm not aware of a method that does this in one go. After doing that, I'm assuming they'll now be sorted exactly how you want in the Album and Tracks view.

[frankz]

Tools->Tagging Tools->Renumber Tracks might do it once you get them in the order you want.

[Mayibongwe]

Tools->Tagging Tools->Renumber Tracks might do it once you get them in the order you want.

That works perfectly. Let us know how it goes @inDe_eD.

[inDe_eD]

Tools->Tagging Tools->Renumber Tracks might do it once you get them in the order you want.

Tools->Tagging Tools->Renumber Tracks might do it once you get them in the order you want.

That works perfectly. Let us know how it goes @inDe_eD.

This works, but these 'albums' get added to fairly often, as music ends up leaking on a daily basis and that means each time I'll have to manually fix the sorting, which can become a major pain

[frankz]

Treating something that's not an album as if it's an actual album is obviously going to have some trade-offs.  Maybe putting them in a playlist and looking at them that way with a custom playlist view would be a better fit than the square peg of non-album tracks in the round hole of album view.

[hiccup]

Treating something that's not an album as if it's an actual album is obviously going to have some trade-offs.  Maybe putting them in a playlist and looking at them that way with a custom playlist view would be a better fit than the square peg of non-album tracks in the round hole of album view.

That's certainly true. That view is intended for albums, which would and should have tracknumbers.
But I am also wondering what kind of sorting MusicBee performs here when tracks have the same (or no) tracknumber.
I can't find the logic there myself, and it might make sense to order the tracks on title if tracknumbers are absent or identical?

[inDe_eD]

Treating something that's not an album as if it's an actual album is obviously going to have some trade-offs.

Definitely agreeable, just curious as it seems there are many great features and options with musicbee! Figured a small, conceptually easy to code "sort album by" feature on right click would be there but unfortunately not , and looks like there isn't exactly a good workaround either

[inDe_eD]

A-ha! I figured it out after some more research and some messing about.

Firstly, in my preferences, under the sorting/grouping tab, I added a custom sort order. First by artist, then album, then track#, then title (all ascending) .



Then, clicking the dropdown bar under the 'Album and Tracks' section in the main frame, shown here:



Hovering over 'sort by' there is now my custom sort option that I added in my settings:



And, voila! It keeps all my normal albums sorted properly, I get to keep all my 'unreleased' folder songs as 'track #1' and they sort alphabetically! Shown here:

[hiccup]

A-ha! I figured it out after some more research and some messing about.
Firstly, in my preferences, under the sorting/grouping tab, I added a custom sort order. First by artist, then album, then track#, then title (all ascending).

It's great if this solution works for you.
But personally I see two possibles issues with doing it like this:

For 'Various Artists' albums, I believe this will split these albums up per artist.

If an album contains different artists, the sorting will no longer be by track number:



Or does this not happen for you, and am I perhaps overlooking some other setting?
 

[inDe_eD]

A-ha! I figured it out after some more research and some messing about.
Firstly, in my preferences, under the sorting/grouping tab, I added a custom sort order. First by artist, then album, then track#, then title (all ascending).

It's great if this solution works for you.
But personally I see two possibles issues with doing it like this:

For 'Various Artists' albums, I believe this will split these albums up per artist.

If an album contains different artists, the sorting will no longer be by track number:



Or does this not happen for you, and am I perhaps overlooking some other setting?
 

Try removing the artist and album from your custom sort rule. If you have it sort by track number then title, it will always sort by track number when applicable. It will only sort alphabetically if it can't sort by track number.

All of my albums that contain multiple artists are labelled as "artist 1, artist 2 & artist 3" as the "artist" so I don't have any files to work with for testing purposes to see if it would cause issues like you are having. However, as mentioned above, I THINK if you just make your custom sort rule to be nothing more than track # ascending, then title ascending, it should work and not mess up albums that have multiple artists like shown in your screenshot.

[hiccup]

I THINK if you just make your custom sort rule to be nothing more than track # ascending, then title ascending, it should work and not mess up albums that have multiple artists like shown in your screenshot.

That will disintegrate pretty much all albums and sort everything by track number.
Using: 'Album Artist/ Album/ Disc#/ Track/ Title' might work better though.

edit:
Added Disc# to the equation to prevent this from happening:

[inDe_eD]

I THINK if you just make your custom sort rule to be nothing more than track # ascending, then title ascending, it should work and not mess up albums that have multiple artists like shown in your screenshot.

That will disintegrate pretty much all albums and sort everything by track number.
Using: 'Album Artist/ Album/ Disc#/ Track/ Title' might work better though.

edit:
Added Disc# to the equation to prevent this from happening:

Smart. That'll do it! Well, at least there was a possibility to sort things the way I wanted, it just was more complex than I thought because it allowed for some pretty extremely in depth and customizable routines. Works great for my stuff, hopefully yours too now!