Alphabetic characters aren't allowed in the track number field. There are billions of vinyl LPs still existing in the world and any song from an LP cannot be listed properly while this bug exists.

if you feel this is a bug then you should file it as such on bugs.kde.org

I have done that.

you should post a link to it here for others who might be interested

also for my edification how are classical album tracks supposed to be handled

The bug is here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360866

I don't have any classical from vinyl, just from CD. They are numbered on the CD.

I don't know how classical tracks are 'supposed' to be handled - I only know how I do it. For example - "Mozart: The 5 Violin Concertos" - Itzhak Perlman with James Levine conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Wiener Philharmoniker in the original German). I ripped this from CD and changed the title for the first track to "01 Mozart, Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine & Itzhak Perlman - Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216- I. Allegro.flac".

Explanation as to why I did it this way: Mozart wrote it and his brilliance is why we are still listening to this music almost 250 years later - so his name is first. "Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine & Itzhak Perlman" are listed because how an artist plays a classical piece changes it quite a bit - look at any cover of a popular song for an example - and the conductor and orchestra's contribution are almost as important as the soloist (Perlman). They are in that order because that is the order in which the ripper named the track. The "I." is the Roman numeral one - because this is the first movement of the concerto.

The second track on the CD and second movement of the concerto is: "02 Mozart, Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine & Itzhak Perlman - Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216- II. Adagio.flac" and the third is "03 Mozart, Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine & Itzhak Perlman - Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216- III. Rondeau. Allegro.flac" The K. 216 is the Kochel catalog number for the work.

If I'd been smarter or had planned it beforehand I might have had the ripper name it in the order Mozart, Itzhak Perlman, James Levine & Vienna Philharmonic - but I was ripping a thousand CDs and didn't think about the small classical part of my music collection until after all the ripping was done. Now I'm concerned about building the database with correct info on the tens of thousands of tracks I have and properly organizing them. Maybe once I get that done, I'll go back and rename the classical ones.

1) I don't see a problem with supporting alphabetic characters in the track number field in principle, I use it too traditionally for LPs, numbering tracks A1, A2, A3 ... B1, B2, B3 for the sides. Is that what you're after? If so, why not be explicitly clear? If it's more general then explain. I'm, not sure whether it's because you'd like to put the Kochel catalog ID as a track number? The story you share about filenaming doesn't seem to illuminate for me what you're actually wanting.

2) An immediate problem is that tracknumber is currently stored in the amarok database as an int(11) field in the tracks table (at least), and that is not alphanumeric and will pose part of the problem. I imagine changing it would be more than 10 minutes work alas, and so beg a solid and clear justification. "any song from an LP cannot be listed properly" doesn't do that for me just as it didn't bother people when the made those LPs into CDs you can sequence the tracks quite easily and A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3 becomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and well, I wonder if that is such a big issue? It wasn't when the LP was released on CD? Need it be when the LP is ripped to MP3?

"A1, A2, A3 ... B1, B2, B3..." Exactly. And C1 C2, C3,... D1, D2... and so on.

Alas, dear young fellow - there is much music that has never been released on CD.

And .mp3s SUCK! Even to my old and somewhat damaged ears.

Well, old man, it's in the bug tracking system, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it

I don't mind giving it a crack myself as I have used A1, A2 before and am not even sure what happened to those when I loaded my library into Amarok, so will add it to my list of things to check. My problem is I have the code here, I can build it, run it and test it, even make mods but I'm shy of doing anything because I can't get debugging to work just yet and am waiting on another forum thread where I'm trying to solve that before I could even get my teeth into this code at any level. And as I said changing a database field, data type is not 10 minute job as it will involve a pretty thorough code search for all places said field is used, and erase any build in integer assumptions along the way, with significant scope for oversight and introducing a bug. Add to that the need to write migration code (so if Amarok finds an integer database field it quietly migrates that whole database to an text field with no risk of damaging the database.

Oh, and as to MP3 you have my sympathies old man, you do because if I understand the history right (and am always happy to learn better) the compression algorithm used in was tuned basically with tests on subjects and the standard compression (loss) rates were chose specifically because some 95% or more of people could not in a double blind test identify the compressed version. I know we did stuff like that in the telecoms industry when turning the voice compression on mobile phones but the test was not for indistinguishable rather for comprehensibility as mobile phones compress radically especially in frequency bands outside of standard voice range (try playing music through a mobile phone link or any phone link for that matter!). And so, you are in the unfortunate minority who can tell a difference. Most of us can't. And the space savings over lossless compression are enormous and clearly attractive. So it was a done deal as the 95% drove the market and the 5% have the high end hifi market they always had.

Or dear young Jedi...

Am not holding my breath. But if you want Amarok to be the best music player ever (I believe it is and it's the best I've tried on both Linux and Windows), I think that this needs to be implemented.

Thanks for your consideration.

Please see my comment in the bug you filed: this is a restrictions due to the ID3 standard, see also http://id3.org/Developer%20Information
In short: the track number is a numeric string!

You can easily work around that restriction by adding the track character you want to the title.

FWIW: please do not file wishes as critical bugs, what is not implemented needs to be filed as a wish.

Bug tracking says, "This is due to the ID3 specifications for the track number: it has to be a numeric string."

I've requested on the bug report that another field be added in a future release that can be used for LP track numbers. Is there someplace else I should also request that?

Thanks to all.

Sorry, Mamarok - it's not a wish. It's a bug. One caused by people who aren't aware there's a hole in their thinking because they weren't alive in the days of LPs. Damit, they should have arranged to be born earlier!

The ID3 spec is a bug, too.