Sorting Asian Characters

2021-04-10 02:13:38

I'm not sure if this is a feature request or is in the settings somewhere but is there someway to change the sorting of fields with Asian characters, maybe to the stroke number or pinyin? Right now its really not useful because it all gets dumped into #

Re: Sorting Asian Characters

Reply #1 – 2021-04-10 05:46:35

It uses the OS's sorting functions, which probably aren't that well suited to anything but Latin scripts. Finding and employing a complex character set classification and sorting algorithm would probably take a lot of work.

Re: Sorting Asian Characters

Reply #2 – 2021-04-11 02:04:57

This has been an issue for me going back to the Sansa Clip days, it's not perfect but my workaround is for instance to leave the Artist tag "原田郁子" as normal, but use the romanized version "Harada Ikuko" for the Album Artist tag, that way it's alphabetized properly for browsing but will still display the proper Artist name in the player view. Also useful if you use Last.fm or something, which also uses the Artist tag.

Re: Sorting Asian Characters

Reply #3 – 2021-04-17 16:04:53

Thanks for the info!

I assumed there was an option to convert asian characters to a latin string in iOS because using the DS Audio app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ds-audio/id321495303), songs are sorted by pinyin and grouped into the resulting letters in the side nav correctly. For example, 王菲 is spelled in pinyin as WangFei which is then sorted under W and grouped in that bucket. I think it would require detecting and converting asian characters to latin script rather than a custom sort or character classification.

For iOS it seems like Core Foundation allows the conversion of asian unicode characters to pinyin. I am less familiar with android but I assume there is the equivalent

Re: Sorting Asian Characters

Reply #4 – 2021-04-17 22:26:00

Unfortunately, only macOS seems to provide the simple means to convert Asian scripts to Pinyin or similar, other platforms need libraries to do that.