Database: Sort an album by artist then title, not JUST title (no track nos.)

[AMJF]

I have a whole bunch of MP3 albums, some are self-made, some are Amazon MP3s, and whilst the Amazons are fine, I have this problem with the self-made albums:

I go into the Database menu, select Album, choose the album, but then the files are listed by title and not artist, even though it's the title that's shown. How can I show the album contents in artist order?

I think the crucial factor is that these albums do NOT have track numbers and it probably sorts by those, but since the albums have hundreds of tracks in each of them, and they are constantly having new files added all over the place alphabetically, I thought it wasn't practical.

So is there a way to sort an album by artist rather than track no.?

Thanks in advance.

[AMJF]

Do you know what I'm talking about? Please reply if so.

[silvertree]

The database requires properly tagged files to sort them.
If tagging isn't important to you than database is not for you.

You can always use the file browser instead.  It will show them in the order they are arranged in the file system.

Still, I can't make sense of what your problem is.

I don't know what you mean by "artist order"

Can you give examples of what database does and examples of what you would like it to do?

[AMJF]

Thanks for responding, Silvertree.

Let's say that I have a single album with the following artists, in alphabetical order:

CAT STEVENS
MICHAEL JACKSON
QUEEN

The emphasis being that all songs by one artist are listed in alphabetical order before moving onto the next artist. This list, BTW, has no track numbers to sort this out already.

Rockbox's Database menu doesn't list the files in this order when I select album, but lists all the songs in alphabetical order REGARDLESS of artist.

However, the music player on my Android smartphone does do this, but I was just wondering if Rockbox could do the same. Then again, the phone's music player's folder mode shows the filename extensions, which looks ugly, whereas Rockbox doesn't and looks better.

I suppose it's either files/folders or database, but I would've preferred to stick to just one for both media players.

[saratoga]

The sort order is editable in the tagnavi file in your .rockbox folder, but I'm not 100% sure what capabilities it has.  The wiki does explain more, so that might be worth a look.

[AMJF]

I heard about tagnavi, but it sounds ridiculously complex, looking at the wiki. I think I may stick to Files for these albums.

[AMJF]

I've just had a good look at editing tagnavi.config, and I've managed to edit the format title to my specification, and as of now I've just about managed to achieve what I wanted in the first place, as I specified in this thread.

However, two of my albums do not have artists as such, but titles only. For the artist string, I've put in a series of dashes separated by spaces ("- - -").

When I edit the title format strings to not show the Artist when it's this string, it does show the string at least once in the album, at the beginning. Any reason for this?