[FiiO]

Dear All,
 
I think, some of you may have already read the thread #10517(click here) by Joe Bloggs about the sorting tracks issue.
For collecting your suggestion and feedback more concentratedly, here is a new thread for you guys to tell us of your thoughts. 
 
The below are our own proposals--would you take a look at them and offer us your opinion on that as well? Your suggestion and feedback may influence the way we designed on the X7 and our new products in the future.
 
Firstly, a list of the different listings and the sorting modes proposed for each listing:
A. All songs
Proposed sorting modes:
1. Alphabetical 
2. Alphabetical2 (as default) — the library quick search feature only works in this sorting mode. 
3. by rating
4. by quality
5. by date added
 
B. Artists
Proposed sorting modes:
1. Alphabetical
2. Alphabetical2
3. by number of tracks performed by artist (default: from most to least)
 
C. Albums
Proposed sorting modes:
1. Alphabetical
2. Alphabetical2
3. by number of tracks in album (default: from most to least)
 
D. (tracks in an album)
Proposed sorting mode:
by Track no. where available
or by Alphabetical or Alphabetical2 where track no. tags are not available
 
E. Genres
Proposed sorting modes:
1. Alphabetical
2. Alphabetical2
3. by number of tracks of that genre (default: from most to least)
 
F. File browsing
Proposed sorting modes:
1. Alphabetical
2. Alphabetical2
3. by number of tracks in folder (default: from most to least)
 
G. Playlists
Proposed sorting modes:
1. by number of tracks in playlist (default: from most to least)
2. by creation date of playlist
3. Alphabetical
4. Alphabetical2
 
Secondly, some explanation of each sorting mode:
1. Alphabetical
-Numbers, special characters, A-Z and Chinese characters will be sorted (in that order--i.e. names starting with numbers will appear first overall and names starting with Chinese characters last)
-Numbers will be sorted by their numeric value, not just by the number appearing first (i.e. "11" will appear after "9", not before)
-Two numbers appearing at the beginning of a name, separated by a "-", will be treated as though they are disc and track numbers, and names with such numbers sorted as such.
-Single number names and two number names, when mixed together, will be sorted as follows: "1 1-01 1-02 1-03 2 2-01 2-02 3")
-tracks belonging to cue sheets will appear after all single tracks
-when multiple cue sheets coexist in a listing: sort by name of cue sheet first, then by name of the track
-when folders and tracks coexist: folders appear on top
 
2. Alphabetical2
Same as "Alphabetical", except:
-Names starting with numbers and special characters appear at the end
-Names starting with Chinese characters appear, mixed in with English character names, according to their pinyin (e.g. "爱" appears between "a" and "b")
 
3. by rating
Sort by star rating of the tracks / albums; by default: from most stars to least stars; when star ratings are identical, sort by "alphabetical" or "alphabetical2"
 
4. by quality
Sort by DSD>PCM ; sort by high sample rate/>low sample rate within DSD and PCM.
 
(each sorting mode can be reversed by clicking again on its icon within the blue "..." button)
 
Looking forward to hearing everybody's take on this matter! 

 
 
Best Regards,
FiiO

 

[FiiO-Shadow]

If anyone has any feedback and suggestion, pls share with us. 

 

[ngs428]

It seems as though we need to take a step back here and get the track sorting done correctly on the current players first.

There have been a number of requests on the X3II thread to have the "All Songs" section use the track name from the tag. Right now you just see file names. When you have your files named "Artist-album-track number-track name" like I do it makes this section useless. I have to rename all my files as "track number-track name" to have a hope of finding what I need.

Honestly that is what I would like to see fixed. As for what you would like to do for the X7 and beyond I haven't thought that far ahead since I am waiting to see my 2nd FiiO DAP sort the way it should.

 

[rosickness]

Alphabetizing by Artists name would be best.  I think when people are feeling a certain mood for music they look for artists before a specific track.  This would also help group a genre with artists.  When I scroll through file names there's too much going on.  You're moving through so many genres.  Having the list categorized by artist not only lets you find a genre but a genre within a genre.  Best bet would be to go to settings to choose the list in all ways but I'm not an engineer and don't know the difficulty of doing that.  I just bought the Fiios X3 II and was surprised it didn't allow me to categorize by artist.  

 

[Citizen Zombie]

I agree with ngs428 that we need to get the basic things right first. For instance, I was quite surprised while using the album category to find similar named albums of different artists mixed together. That is not exactly what I had in mind when I used this option. I don't have a perfect solution for this, simply repeating the name of the album(s) sorted by the name of the artist or adding the artists name behind the name of the album could be acceptable for my fellow friends of FIIO customers.
 
Let me give the example of one of the collisions I found in my library. I have two albums named Apocalypse from Bill Calahan and from Thundercat. Thus maybe the list could look like
Apocalypse (leading to Bill Calahan, because his name is sorted before Thundercat)
Apocalypse
OR
Apocalypse (Bill Calahan)
Apocalypse (Thundercat)
I would not use the format
Apocalypse - Bill Calahan
Apocalypse - Thundercat
because this would make me wonder why this isn't used all the time for every album.
 
 
 
And, important message to all musicians out there on this planet: Do not number your albums. Others did that before. A huge number of "others".

 

[Audalu]

Hi there,
 
I own an X1 for about a week now and I really enjoy it. That said, I still have some strong opinions about the way playback is handled.
So please consider that the following will be all about how _I_ would like it to be; suited for my needs.
 
Regarding "All songs"
 
Sort all the tracks like they are on the storage and make it shuffle friendly.
 
i.E. I have the following folders:
 
Abba\Gold\
Bruce Hornsby\Radio Hits\
Diabulus in Musica\Secrects\
Diabulus in Musica\The Wanderer\
...
 
The track order would be:
 
01 gold song
02 gold song
03 ..
01 radio hits song
02 radio hits song
03 ...
01 secrets song
02 secrets song
03 ...
01 the wanderer song
02 the wanderer song
03 ...
 
That way, when you shuffle (which is really the only point for the "All songs" category if you ask me), you can easily be like: 
"Oh yeah great! Its that band I love, but I'd rather listen to that other song on the same album / that other album before i continue my shuffling."
 
Now you just have to scroll for a short time to get to the desired song. Of course, this only applies to people (like myself), who use "track title" file names. I guess people who named their tracks with a distinct name pattern (like "artist - album - track title") don't really have that problem (but why would you bloat the file name with information already given by folder structure).

There is already a way to achieve this by creating a playlist on the computer with all the tracks in the desired order. But the loading times are humongous when opening the playlist, so I ditched that method.
 
Another approach would be to sort by artist, alphabetical or whatever and separate the functions of the scroll wheel and the back button.
When you scroll the wheel, you just move in the normal list as is. But when you press the back button, you actually jump to the folder the current file is based in. Then you can move around the file system (folder structure and everything) and choose the next song. The chosen song will of course just move you to the song in the "All Songs" list.
 
Last approach would be to just introduce a "shuffle all" option for the "Browse Files" section (the already existing shuffle option would become "shuffle folder" or something like that). Then I wouldn't care for the "All Songs" category no more and it could become something entirely different (Composer maybe? or year? who knows, get crazy).
 
Regarding Album
 
I'm ok with how it is on the surface (alphabetical), but I totally see the point of Citizen Zombie. An indicator for the artist would be welcome.
 
Also regarding the files inside each album:
 
I have a compilation with 14 discs of lute music. Each disc is in its own folder.
 
Lute music\CD 01 - John Dowland\01 track name
Lute music\CD 02 - J.S. Bach\01 ...
Lute music\CD 03  ...
 
I now have 3 options:
 
Tag each disc of the album with a disc number (i.E. "Lute music 01, Lute music 02, etc.") so it will appear as such in the menu. That's messy.
 
I tag each disc with the same album name ("Lute music"). But then I will have track 1 of each disc at the beginning, followed by each track 2, etc. That's against nature.
 
Third option would be of course the second option but every track being named "01-01 ...", "02-01...". Again, that's messy.
 
My proposal: there is a tag called discnumber. Use it first to sort all the files by their respective disc (ascending) before you sort via track number or alphabetical.
Generally speaking for most of the categories: Use multiple tags to provide a better structure inside the main option (artist, genre, album).
 
The last thing I would really appreciate is an option to blacklist folders.
I don't want my audio books to be in the "All songs" category. Just give me an option to highlight folders to not show up at all in these categories. Either via UI on the player or text file on the computer (with every folder manually listed in a text file or an empty text file in each desired folder with a distinct name like "aaah_please_dont_show_up_and_ruin_the_flow.txt" or something).
 
Again, these are all suited specifically for my needs, so your mileage my differ.
 
As I said in the beginning, I own an X1. My ship runs on a tight budget and with that, I probably wont be able to afford your new high tier equipment. So please consider implementing solutions provided in this thread (foremost my own of course ;D) in your existing hardware (foremost the X1 of course ;D).
 
Thanks for reading and relating.