Issue playing sub-folders in alphabetical order

[alexbrn]

I am using Winamp v5.63 under Windows 7 to play my music collection, which exists in files and folders which are alphabetically named to ensure correct playback order (in conjunction with Winamp's playlist option to enforce playback by alphabetical order)..

After a recent backup/restore this no longer works as expected in the following case:

If I have a folder named "Work" and this contains three folders, "Act 1", "Act 2" and "Act 3", then right-clicking on "Work" folder and selecting "Play in Winamp" does not result in the folders being queued/played in order (instead, creation date seems to play a role). By contrast if I multi-select the three folders and select "Play in Winamp" then they are played in order.

So it seems Winamp is not queuing folders by alphabetical order when they are subfolders of a folder being queued itself for playback.

- Alex.

[Aminifu]

Hi alexbrn,

I think this may be an issue with the Winamp (and OS) design decisions rather than incorrect behavior. Lacking explicit instructions, I would expect Winamp (and the underlying OS) to try to process things in the fastest manner possible.

In the case of sub-folders of a parent folder, I would expect the sub-folders to be processed in the order in which they happen to be on the storage media rather than in some convenient homo-centric order. Alpha-numeric order makes sense to us, but it means nothing to machines.

The instruction to list (and therefore play) items in a playlist in alphabetical order does not necessarily mean that the selection of the sub-folders (that these items come from) also be done in alphabetical order.

When using drag & drop from Windows Explorer to Winamp, the OS will often change the order of items from what is expected (even instructed within Winamp), thus requiring additional reordering, after the drag & drop, to reach the desired result. I would expect similar results using the context menu commands.

Anyway, in your example, after the backup/restore you got the ordering you expected by selecting all the sub-folders instead of the parent folder. If my theory is correct, that may not always work. Worst case, it may be necessary to select 1 sub-folder at a time to get the desired order.

[alexbrn]

hi Aminifu

Thanks for the reply!

Things have got more mysterious now that I have copied the files (again) from their temporary home on a network shared RAID drive, back to a NTFS partition. Now the subfolders appear to replay again in alphabetical order (as they always did before, pre-backup).

Whatever Winamp does, it *should* I think always sort taking the folder name into account. In code this should not be hard: even if the internal structure used to hold the playlist is flat, by simply including the relative path for each item in it, this sorting could be achieved:

Act 1/Track 01
...
Act 1/Track nn
...
Act 2/Tract 01
...
Act 2/Track nn
...
etc.

If the sorting is by filename only (regardless of folder) I don't see how that would be useful for users, and there would be the possibility of name collision also.


- Alex.

[Aminifu]

There are 5 ways a playlist can be sorted; by title, by filename, by path and filename, reverse current order, and randomize.

Different users can find (and have found) a use for 1 or more of the choices. Name collisions do occur. It appears that the secondary sort order in these cases seems to be random unless sort by path and filename was selected.

The ability to control the 2nd and 3rd order sort decisions, especially in the media library, has long been requested. Hopefully it will happen in the near future.