Top Rated ranking

[l.dc]

Hello!
Complements of the Season.
In the auto playlists, 'Top Rated' does arrange the songs by their ratings if you arrange them by the '#'. However, I wonder if they have a SECOND order if multiple songs have the same rating. I think it would be great if the player had play count in recent times or something as a secondary requirement for the rankings of top songs.

[ma_t14]

You can define a custom sorting in Edit>Preferences>Sorting/Grouping

Set the Rating for the first field and maybe the play count for the second.

Then in the main panel right click on a sorting column and select your sorting and also sort descending.

[l.dc]

You can define a custom sorting in Edit>Preferences>Sorting/Grouping

Set the Rating for the first field and maybe the play count for the second.

Then in the main panel right click on a sorting column and select your sorting and also sort descending.

Thanks. I am just saying that it would be great to have the default 'top songs' have a secondary requirement or something.

[ma_t14]

Well maybe in the next stable release Steven could incorporate the change and make it default. It's no big deal as anyone can edit the autoplaylist to what suits him/her best 

[Anti]

It's already there.
Each autoplaylist remembers its own columns and sorting.
To do what you want, expose the playcount column (by right-clicking the column header).
Then click the rating column a couple of times so it descends 5 stars to 0 stars.
Then ctrl click the playcount column until it is also descending high to low.
You will notice the rating column has a little 1 next to it (make it wider if you can't see it).
And the playcount column has a little 2 next to it.
In other words, the rule being applied is 'sort by rating first and then by playcount'.

By doing it that way, you don't 'waste' one of your three custom sorting presets.

There is much more to be said about sorting, and it can get quite mysterious. For instance:
When a [EDIT: auto]playlist is first created, if no sorting is specified it appears to be by Artist then by Album Title by default.
You can see some  of the # numbers are out of order.
If you click the # column, you can see that whilst the # is in order now, the order of the tracks makes little sense. It displays the order that the tracks were dynamically selected when the list was loading the tracks, but it's neither random nor any discernible pattern that I can make out.

What to take from that is musicbee has some inbuilt logic when selecting and ordering tracks that you can't see, so don't freak out when you see strange results in your sorting and can't work out why. It's just is the way it is.

Anyway, I hope I answered your original query.

[ma_t14]

There is much more to be said about sorting, and it can get quite mysterious. For instance:
When a list is first created, if no sorting is specified it appears to be by Artist then by Album Title by default.
You can see some  of the # numbers are out of order.
If you click the # column, you can see that whilst the # is in order now, the order of the tracks makes little sense. It displays the order that the tracks were dynamically selected when the list was loading the tracks, but it's neither random nor any discernible pattern that I can make out.

What to take from that is musicbee has some inbuilt logic when selecting and ordering tracks that you can't see, so don't freak out when you see strange results in your sorting and can't work out why. It just is the way it is.

How to reproduce this? Whatever I do I cant reproduce the behaviour you describe 

[Anti]

I create an autoplaylist and don't change any settings.

This is right after the autoplaylist has been created:

You can see:
· artist column is selected automatically (I didn't select any sorting option, or click on the column)
· numbering starts at #44 and #1 is near the bottom of the screenshot
· the numbering appears to be mostly paired Eg. 44+45, 42+43, 48+49, etc
· the tracks are sorted by artist first, then by album - there are no anomalies - the whole list is correctly sorted by that criteria

The next image shows what happens when I click the # column:

You can see:
· the # are all in order now
· the tracks are sorted nicely by artist at the beginning of the list. However at the end (#2500-2700) the artists are mixed up.
· within each artist, some of the tracks are out of order as shown by the red dots. This happened when the list was
  dynamically created. There doesn't appear to be any pattern to it.

Now, when I click another playlist, and then back onto this one, the beginning of the list fixes itself - no more 'red dot' tracks.
However, the last 6th of the list is still all mixed up, as before, and it looks generally like it has something to do with the added or modified date.

So that's what I mean by not getting freaked out by strange anomalies when sorting - it doesn't always do what you think it's going to do, or should do.

[ma_t14]

Oh, now I see. I thought you were talking about static playlists.

I think you should make a bug report as it definitely doesn't seem normal nor logical. You already explained what happens so all that remains is to paste it into a new thread...

[l.dc]

That was one of the best tips Anti. Thanks.

[Steven]

"Playlist order" makes no sense for auto-playlists as the method of retrieval varies depending on a number of factors.
Perhaps i should enforce a default ordering (as anti mentioned i think for a brand new auto-playlist its artist - title, but sorting it in natural order afterwards for an auto-playlist makes it is not in any particular order)

[Anti]

> the method of retrieval varies depending on a number of factors

Yes, that's all I was trying to explain; these aren't sorting bugs, but occur just because MB has logic and processes that we're not always privy to, especially during the dynamic selection of tracks.

Another example is sorting just by clicking on the rating column only.
This is the same list as before sorted by rating:


All the five-star tracks are listed first as we'd expect.
But MB is automatically sorting just by album this time, instead of artist then album, as the default sort does.
So when the list gets to the four-star tracks, it starts with albums beginning with 'A' again.

That is only one 'rule' applied, so it is quite easy to see what MB is doing 'behind the scenes' in this instance. More difficult is to fathom why the logic has changed from 'artist then album' to 'album' only. Further, if you have autoplaylists with multiple rules, it can be very difficult to work out why tracks are selected and listed in a certain way.

My advice above was simply not to worry if you get some 'huh?' moments.

[Steven]

i've changed it so auto-playlists now (should!) always have album, disc-track# as the secondary sort
for the cases where you think its not returning the correct results i will need a specific example. The only thing i can think of that might produce inconsistent results is when you nest auto-playlists that have dependencies on other auto-playlists which end up being circular