Tagnavi being silly

[Toxikator]

this is more a curious question than a real problem, so don't worry too much about it...

What I'll sometimes do is set Rockbox to shuffle all the songs on my iPod (5G, in case it matters later) by turning on "shuffle", selecting the database's "tracks" view, and choosing a song... from there it builds a playlist of all my songs.

Over time, I started putting on more audiobooks, comedy, et al.. so I went ahead and tagged them all as "spoken word" and then figured I'd set up Tagnavi accordingly.

I created a submenu under "Track" with two categories... one, called "All", which just has the command 'title', and one called "music", with the command 'title ? genre != "spoken word"'

It works fine, with one little curiosity: for some reason, the tracks are shuffled when you select the "music" tab.

Originally (and now, under the "all" tab), the tracks all appear in alphabetical order.. but under the music tab, they start with 'V', and then jump all over the place in what is sometimes (but not ALL the time) a semblance of alphabetical order.

It's no big deal since I usually use it just to shuffle tracks so not having them in order is irrelevant from a practical standpoint, but I am puzzled by the behaviour. What causes the random order?

[bascule]

This shouldn't happen.

What format string are you using (title = "fmt_xxxx")? This is what should determione how they are sorted.

[Toxikator]

no format string... Tagnavi  never did. I just said "title". I have the fmt_title string for the Album and Artist category since the track number is important. But in the original tagnavi file it didn't include the format string so I left it out.  

[bascule]

The only other thing I think it can be is your Sort Files setting:
[Main Menu]>Settings>General Settings>File View>Sort Files

This determines the default sorting, even for the Database view. If it is anything other than Alphabetical, then it may cause what you are seeing.

If not,

[Toxikator]

It's set properly, and as I said it's only the "title ? genre != "spoken word"" bit that does it.

The other submenu option (the one that goes straight "title" still comes out in alphabetical order".

Looking over it, I kind of wonder if it's doing a genre>title sort? as in, the reason Tool's Viginti Tres appears first is it's GENRE is alphabetically first, and the genres are sorted, and the tracks within them then sorted? I mean, it WOULD explain the distinciton (since only one of the submenu options is being told to do anything with the genre tag to begin with)...

If it's a bug, I can work around it by removing the other genre tags... otherwise, I'll make the necessary tagnavi sorting change.

[bascule]

Looking over it, I kind of wonder if it's doing a genre>title sort? as in, the reason Tool's Viginti Tres appears first is it's GENRE is alphabetically first, and the genres are sorted, and the tracks within them then sorted? I mean, it WOULD explain the distinciton (since only one of the submenu options is being told to do anything with the genre tag to begin with)...

Could be... Unfortunately, you'd need someone who knew the code to answer that

If it's a bug, I can work around it by removing the other genre tags... otherwise, I'll make the necessary tagnavi sorting change.

I would have thought the easiest way is to add a format string:
title = "fmt_title" ? genre != "spoken word"

[Toxikator]

yeah but fmt_title adds track numbers, yeah? almost all of my tracks have track numbers as I do whole albums.

I guess I could create a NEW format tag (like "fmt_name") but I don't know how to do that, and the Rockbox Wiki doesn't explain the sorting, so...

[bascule]

Just add this:

%format "fmt_spoken"       "%s" title

I see no reason why that should not sort in simple alphabetical order...

[Toxikator]

I'll give it a shot.

BTW I've been unable to figure what, exactly, "%s" does.

[bascule]

%s just means a string, as compared to %d, a decimal number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printf#printf_format_placeholders

[Toxikator]

Followup: it didn't work.

Is there some way to force tagnavi to sort by a certain value? It seems to be sorting by genre first, though I just want to use genre as the filter.

[roolku]

Is there some way to force tagnavi to sort by a certain value?

Yes, using a format string as Bascule suggested. However that should not be neccessary, as alphabetical by title is the default for no format string.

It seems to be sorting by genre first, though I just want to use genre as the filter.

I can't duplicate that behaviour. I tried 3 testfiles with different genres (A,B,C):

title1 C
title2 B
title3 A

and used the following line in my tagnavi:

"music" -> title ? genre != "B"

The list shows

title1
title3

as expected. I have also tried to exclude a genre on my "proper" database

"music" -> title ? genre != "Dance"

and it worked as expected. There seems to be something unusual about you system, but I have no idea what.

[Toxikator]

what player/build are you using?

Also, I'm beginning to suspect that genre is not the primary sorting characteristic.
The tracks seem to be sorted in reverse alphabetical order by directory (starting with the alphabetically last file in any directory) and the directories are sorted by date added (Tool is first b/c it was the first album I physically transferred to my iPod, ending with the most recent albums added).

I tried changing the "sort by" setting to newest date, date, and back to alphabetical, and each time nothing changed in that or any other folder  

[Toxikator]

Figured it out! It was that the "max files in dir browser" parameter was set too low. It was causing the tracks to wrap around in a weird way; I'd get to the bottom and just see "y" tracks (and I knew there were Zs), and as I scrolled around the visible tracks changed, and sometimes tracks linked to wrong tracks; so I set the value higher and bam! works perfectly.

sweet! No idea why that happened, though.

[lav]

Oh, wow, i was actually having a similar problem. I have all my tagnavi options set to show 'A to Z'-style lists (for tracks, albums, and artists), and at the top of those lists i have added an option called 'all tracks' which, naturally, shows all the tracks. When viewing tracks by letter (e.g., all tracks starting with A) everything was sorted perfectly fine. When i went to the 'all tracks' option, though, it had just completely random stuff. No order i could see.

Increasing 'max files in dir browser' fixed it, though. I guess now that i think of it that makes sense, but the name of the option ('dir browser'?) certainly threw me off until i read this thread.