sort order Smart Playlists / Streaming Audio

[t0m]

Hi Folks,

I’ve added some audio streams to my database as described in the Streaming Audio HOWTO and can play the streams fine using my SB.

The thing I wonder about is, the order my SB displays the streams when selecting the playlist – it’s neither alphabetical nor by date.

So who’s responsible for the sorting order, the Server or the Client?

/T0m

[rpedde]

Good question. mt-daapd sends them in the order they are specified in the playlist.

What the client does with them is it’s business. iTunes sorts them, but I don’t belive Roku does. So iTunes puts them in the order it feels is most appropriate, while the soundbridge displays them in the order that they come from mt-daapd.

Bottom line is that mt-daapd can “suggest” and order, but the client is ultimately responsible for determining order.

[t0m]

rpedde wrote:

Good question. mt-daapd sends them in the order they are specified in the playlist.

you’r right. I’ve created a static playlist pointing to the .url files – the roku displays the streams in the order they are in the playlist.

so the question is now:
what’s the order the url are added to the Smart Playlist?

/t0m

[rpedde]

In the smart playlists, the order is the order that it fetches it from the database, which, for gdbm, is whatever order it feels like.

If you are serving from a machine with some horsepower, you can go into the top of db-gdbm.c and change “WANT_SORT” from 0 to 1.

That will sort stuff by artist, album, track. But it pulls the entire database and does an insertion sort on it, so it will only work on a real machine with some ram, not a NSLU2.

— Ron

[rpedde]

You might check your roku firmware. Seems like a recent-ish roku firmware update did sorting by track on the client-side.

Might be that an updated firmware will fix that.

Failing that, you’ll have to modify db-gdbm.c as mentioned above.

— Ron

[rpedde]

Theoretically, yeah, but the 0.2.x codebase is pretty much unmaintained for a push to the 0.3.0 codebase… all the database stuff has been completely re-written with a sql backend, so it doesn’t make much sense to go mucking around adding features in it.

I had hoped for a 0.3.0-pre1 before the end of the year, but now I’m thinking late January?

— Ron

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