Version: 2.3 (using KDE KDE 3.5.0) Installed from: Gentoo Packages When an album consists of multiple discs, the order within the playlist is Artist->Album->Track->Track Name, which has the effect of interleaving track 1 off each disc, then track 2, etc. It would be nice if the sort was Artist->Album->Disc->Track, so that all of disc 1 would play first, then disc 2, and so on. Sure, I could just distinguish the albums by making the album names unique with a [Disc N] suffix, but then the album playlist view of the currently playing track and album random play would only show/play a single disc.
So you're suggesting adding a field for tracking the album number?
Yes. I don't know what sort of support is available for obtaining that data from the tagging information stored within the file, as I haven't investigated, but I believe there is a TPOS frame in ID3v2 that indicates which part of a set the audio came from.
Yes, that does exist in ID3v2, but I don't know of any ripping programs that actually set the values there. Also the other formats supported by JuK don't have something similar. I might consider adding something like this at some point as a column that's hidden by default. In practice you would need to tag all of the albums within JuK that were multi-part for this to work, so it would be less cool than it sounds. ;-)
"Yes, that does exist in ID3v2, but I don't know of any ripping programs that actually set the values there." As for me, I do not rely to ripping programs to fill tags up. For classical music, they are ALWAYS wrong or inaccurate to the least. I use Kid3 and sometimes EasyTag. It is possible to edit the DISCNUMBER tag with both of them. I consider to use JuK in the future, which I have discovered very recently, and I think that it should do the same as these programs. The DISCNUMBER tag is very useful for classical music. But I think of The Beatles' White Album too, as well of jazz anthologies who often consist in several CDs. Amarok 1.4 uses the DISCNUMBER tag, both in the play-list and in the collection list. This is for me an essential tag (about 15% of my collection consist in albums with several CDs). The Windows Media Player solution (for example: "The Beatles Disc 1", "The Beatles Disc 2") is a joke! For an album with multiple CDs, there is only ONE album. The disc number information belongs to a tag, not to the album's title. "Also the other formats supported by JuK don't have something similar." Oops! What a pity! Anyway, could it be possible to handle the DISCNUMBER tag whenever it exists?
My collection also contains many multidisc albums, and they are all correctly tagged using services like MusicBrainz. In order to sort by disc number in Juk I have to enable the file name column and sort by file name. Most other players recognize the disc number tag and sort their album column by taking disc number into account.
+1 A long time ago I used itunes, which has a disk number field (presumably it still does). So there *are* other tools out there that use/set such a field. (I could possibly figure out for you what field itunes used, assuming I can find a file with a disk number that was set by itunes, if that's useful.) I have quite a few multi-disc albums and would really appreciate this feature!