Sorting issue.

2023-01-11 12:40:12

For years I'm using Foobar Mobile (1.3.1 724). Due to space limitations I transcode to MP3 using a playlist.
As my sister gifted me a 1 TB micro SD, no need for transcoding anymore so I simply sync all my FLAC's to the SD.

Much to my chagrin, a lot of albums are sorted wrong like 1,2,3,8,9,10,4,5,6,7.
Sorting an Album is a matter of sorting by disc / track and indeed the albums having this problem have tracks where the  DISCNUMBER tag is not in the meta data and other tracks have   DISCNUMBER = 0.
This is indeed how the tracks are sorted. First all the tracks with no DISCNUMBER tag then all the tracks where DISCNUMBER = 0

Obvious a inconsistency in my tags but I have these albums for years and never noticed this problem.
On Windows they sort correct
On Android I never have seen this problem using Foobar / MP3
On Android other players like BubbleUPnp or Onkyo HF player sort correctly.

It looks like this behavior although consistent is specific to Foobar / FLAC.
I would appreciate if Foobar treats missing DISCNUMBER and   DISCNUMBER = 0 as being the same.

Re: Sorting issue.

Reply #1 – 2023-01-12 00:09:54

There should not be a condition for DISCNUMBER to be 0, as there is no such thing. In general this should be 1 or greater, or cleared. Either way, if your tags are not consistent, you can’t expect the player to behave differently. This should be an easy fix using any tag editor from a PC. Simply filter for all files with DISCNUMBER=0 and delete that field for all files.

The condition is likely handled differently between mp3 files using ID3 tags, and FLAC files with Vorbis tags.

Re: Sorting issue.

Reply #2 – 2023-01-12 10:20:27

Obvious Foobar is very strict, unlike e.g. JRiver, MUsicbee, Onkyo HF , they simply treat 0 and NULL as being the same.
Anyway, corrected 9000 tracks so now I'm waiting Foobar to index them, will probably take hours (first scan took 26 hours...)