"Natural" Sorting of Albums with Numbers in the Title

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

I notice that Roon takes the easy way out when sorting albums that have leading numbers in the title. For example, Roon displays these albums in my collection in this order:
1,1000,1000,19,1953, 1984, 2001, 20th, 21, 25, 50, 538, 538, and 69

Roon 31.png1970×1280 2.05 MB

In an ideal world, Roon would display these albums in their natural order, i.e.
1, 19, 20th, 21, 25, 50, 69, 538, 538, 1000, 1000, 1953, 1984, 2001…

I realise this is a minor thing, and if it gets added to the list, it will be way down the list of priorities, but it’s a nice quality touch, I feel.

BTW, Emby gets this right - it’s one of the few products I’ve seen that has this attention to detail.

7 Likes
2

I requested this a while back as it would be handy for collections that have Vol. 1, Vol. 2, etc. as part of the album title. I can’t find my original post but think one of the team said they would add it to the todo list. JRiver gets this right as well.

3

Roon is the only App I know that doesn’t sort correctly. Doesn’t all operating systems provide functions for natural sort you can use? On macOS it seems to be dead easy. :wink:

4

It’s far from common, in my experience. For example Plex and Microsoft Groove sort the same way as Roon, i.e. not in the natural sort order. It’s rather ironic that Microsoft’s venerable Windows Media Player (introduced in 1991) gets the sort order right. Ironic, because Microsoft wants to kill off WMP, while at the same time apparently having learned nothing from it.

Roon 474
Roon 474.jpg1349×1145 691 KB

5

Well, I only know macOS and iOS and its Apps but as I remember right even Windows Explorer does it the natural way. Anyway, it shouldn’t be hard for a programmer to exchange the sort function with a more modern one.

6

For a piece of software that praises itself for the experience it delivers - and mostly right so, at least compared to the “competition” - the lack of natural sorting is rather disappointing and feels more like a bug than a feature request which lingers in some queue for almost three years now.

If roon would read the Sort Album Title file tags and use those for Album Title sorting there’d be a chance for work around the old ASCII art of sorting. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

7

You are, of course, assuming that the metadata sources would get it right in the first place. Judging from my experience, missing data, or alternatively the error rate when they bother to supply data, is woefully high. Garbage In, Garbage out…

8

Of course would the source get it right: it would be me! :smiley: … If roon would read the file tag I could prepare it in my tagging app to overcome roons inability to sort like I feel it would be right without making a mess out of the “real” album title which gets displayed in the UI.

9

I know this issue has been raised several times before. But, since this is such a fundamental and still trivial issue, I will raise it again (and again if necessary). First of all I think Roon 1.8 is really great in most respects, but there are obvious flaws. One of the these is the error in sorting titles with numbers, e.g., 100 is listed before 11 etc. This problem was raised many years ago, so why on earth has it not been fixed? Beats me.

10

So annoying! How hard can it be to fix this flaw in Roon?

Screenshot 2021-08-30 at 12.55.33
Screenshot 2021-08-30 at 12.55.331920×1192 220 KB

1 Like
11

Yes, this is pretty bad. Is there no progress on this issue yet?

12

Type albumname Vol 01.
That does the trick.

13

Is there anyway to get this feature request noticed again now that you can vote on feature requests. This seems like something fairly imporant and it’s a fairly easy fix.