the trick here would be to use online query to get the canonical order of tracks from an album, and build a playlist where those tracks are in album order, regardless of track number derived from mp3 header...

This seems a bit pointless to me. Why not just fix the tracks' tags, either manually or with the MusicBrainz lookup?

Me too. Good tags rule, and it isn't hard (just tedious) to fix your tags.

Fix your tags!

Musicbrainz was a mixed blessing -- it worked, somewhat, but in the end, screwed up as much as it got right. Just the ability to query CDDB or whatever and have the canonical album order applied to a set of tracks... doesn't seem such an odd request.

Not an odd request, and your wishes will be granted in the next release. In git, you can query MusicBrainz, and I think another source will be added as well.

popeSidious wrote:the trick here would be to use online query to get the canonical order of tracks from an album

What do you consider 'canonical order of tracks'.

Theoretically every commercial CD is identified with a unique identifier that could be looked up and matched to a track listing, but the ability to determine a 'canonical order of tracks' is limited by the quality of information in the database you are looking the stuff up in.

Musicbrainz relies heavily on users to supply information and A: Get the correct identification of the CD and B: match that identification to an existing track listing or supply the names of the tracks if things don't match.

If you think in general terms, each CD may have multiple versions where releases of it in different countries may include different tracks, different ordering of the tracks, different naming of the tracks either because of language issues or to identify the versions of a track as it was release in a particular country and there may also be re-issues that may also have the tracks in a different order, incorporate different variants of the tracks as they were release in different countries, include additional live or studio tracks that were not on the original release.

Then you have things like some of the earlier Black Sabbath releases where the tracks are not listed in the same order as they were on the tape/CD to begin with.

And that's before you even get in to potential discrepancies that may or may not occur with audio thumbprints due to quality and encoding issues and other potential differences between what you get if you rip an actual CD versus what you get if you buy a downloadable version.

Not saying anything one way or the other about the feature in question being good or bad, just pointing out some things that may result in the feature not always getting the order correct based on my experience in using Picard to tag my stuff.

Later, Seeker