@CayinSupport - Will you consider sorting the Albums by year (only when browsing by Artist and looking at all albums for the given artist) ? Alphabetically is fine for easy finding of albums, but sorting by year gives you a more natural view of the artist discography - "Do I want to listen to their latest album?", "Let's try their classic stuff, the early ones", etc. It could also be an option in the Music settings.
What do you think?
Sorting by year doesn't make much sense...what about those who don't take the time to tag their files completely? Or how about the improperly tagged ones (there's so much bad metadata out there that show the wrong year!)? Or what about remastered/hi-res albums?
I've seen many that were say from 1970, but remastered in 2014 (HDTracks!). Some of the albums reported year as 1970. Yet, others reported 2014 in the YEAR metatag. How would you tag those? I have a set of albums that was originally released in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1987. But, all the remastered hi-res version were done in the same year - 2015. I store the folder structure as "1983-2015. album (24-96 HDA, remastered)". You can't put that data into the YEAR field - you'd have to use the ORIGYEAR to store the 1983 and YEAR for the 2015. And, there's very few programs that read the ORIGYEAR correctly.
I for one, know the order of release on all the artists in my collection. I don't have the release years commited to memory, but I know the release order.
Also, the N3 wasn't meant to be a do-it-all DLNA type device. It was designed as a cheap, good-sounding, hi-res player. I have some 30+ phones sitting around here, but I have zero music on any of them. I use them for their best-performing feature, as a phone. I use the N3 too for it's best-performing feature, music playback. I'll do the complicated sorting, tagging, and reorganizing on the device best suited for it (with processor power and memory to spare) - my computer.
If Cayin spent the time, money, and resources to implement these functions, it could exceed the processing power or RAM requirements (and make it run like a Fiio X1II). But what would more likely be the problem is that it's draw resources and income from their higher-end line of devices that are designed to be the ultimate player.
I, for one, think that the N3's set of features is perfect where it is, especially at the cost and performance of the device. Now if we could only get enough people to get a glass screen protector...