Hello! I am actually pretty new to all this so I only used the former version of Amarok for about a month and a half but I quickly learnt to love it... anyway, Amarok 2.0 looks and works great! But I can't find any way to make it do what I want, basically to sort the playlist by whichever criteria I chose, but now it's an unchangable Artist/Album one.

So I was wondering if there's a way to make it sort the whole playlist (>2,000 song).

I apologize if this can be done with dynamic playlists but I have never used them and I've been trying to but I can't seem to get it to work right.

Jerfo wrote:So I was wondering if there's a way to make it sort the whole playlist (>2,000 song).

Why would you put 2000 tracks in one playlist? That isn't the way Amarok 2 is supposed to be used.

You use the Collection browser (left side), use grouping and sorting there to locate the music you want, and then drag the few tracks or albums to the playlist.

Easy as pie

Well, I'm in the middle of purging my collection and many more songs than those remain... but even if it were only 200, what if I don't want it sorted by author/album (and it doesn't sort it flawlessly, sometime in between the same author a different one will appear)? What if I want to sort it by, say, genre, length, heck, even format for the sake of converting those songs that remain in a format that's not good enough for me? That was so simple to do before...

What I usually do is put most of the music I have in one big playlist (which contains most of the tracks I have, but not all of them since there are some which I only like to hear when I am in a certain mood) and then let amarok play that in random order, so big playlist are perfectly normal and I prefer them to dynamic playlists where you always have only a little part of your collection available. Whenever I want to hear a certain track I search it using the playlist filter and queue it.

How can we use the collection browser to manage the tracks we have? It shows only a very little part of the available metadata, even less than the playlist. When I manage music I need to see as much metadata as possible of the tracks I manage, and I want to quickly find any track using any of the available metadata, and no interface I ever saw is able to do that as good as the table style where I can filter and sort by anything. For example I just looked for a way to show all tracks I rated 3 in a list and could not find it, which basically means that rating is unusable for me. Simply sorting the huge playlist by rating would have done it. I also found out that some of my tracks have a composer set even though I don't want them to and had a hard time finding them and removing the (faulty) data - just displaying the composer column and sorting by it would have done it.

Please don't get me wrong, I like the new playlist when I just want to see which songs will be played soon, that is, when I actually use it as playlist. And it's true what I did with Amarok 1.4 obviously was misusing the playlist as collection management view. But a result of improving the way the playlist can be used the way it is supposed to, Amarok now lacks a usable way to quickly manage the metadata of a collection, something which is a necessary in a player as a playlist. Perhaps that should indeed be a completely separated element, but it should be available somehow.