Sorting by Date Instead of Year

[dmullinax]

I have some albums and B'Sides of the same artist that published the music the same year, but different dates.  I would like to sort them by release date instead of year.  For example:

I have two singles and a studio album.  The first is a single released in March, following the studio album then another single.

Can I Play with Madness (Single)
Release date: 1988-03-20

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son:
Release date: 1988-04-11

The Evil that Men Do (Single):
Release date: 1988-08-01

I would like to be able to sort them by date, but it instead sorts by year, following alphabetical order of the title track.  I end up something like this.

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: Moon Child
Can I Play with Madness: Black Bart Blues
The Evil that Men Do: Prowler '88
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: Infinite Dreams
Can I Play with Madness: Massacre
The Evil that Men Do: Charlotte the Harlot '88
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: Can I Play with Madness
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: The Evil that Men Do
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: The Prophecy
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: The Clairvoyant
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son: Only the Good Dye Young

So as you can see, and I tried to highlight in red the singles get mixed in with the other tracks by the same artist for the same year.  I would like the ability to sort by year - month - day instead of just year.  Something like yyyy-mm-dd.

I know where I go to add the release date.  That is Song Properties > Advanced Tag Editing > Date.  But when I try to sort, I click on Sort By > Custom, and in the drop-down "Available" filter, I see no option to sort by date, just year.

By the way love this software!  Had to work out a few kinks but love how I have more control over organizing my library.  Thanks for all your hard work with this.

-David

[Quentin Sculo]

Sorry, currently gmb doesn't support dates, only the year.

About using the advanced tag editing dialog, this dialog is mostly separate from everything else in gmb. So you can add any tag you want, but only the fields displayed in the non-advanced dialog are used within gmb. (well, some fields can be added in the fields tab of the settings dialog)

About your specific problem, you can sort by any number of the supported fields, for example sorting by year then album would make sure the album songs are grouped together (if they have the same year).
You could also maybe use other fields, like the path or filename, if you include the full date in the folder name that would allow you to sort them like you want.

gmb also supports custom fields, though currently they are not linked to file tags (apart for custom fields of type rating). That way you could use a custom field that contain the release date in format yyyy-mm-dd and it would sort correctly.

I plan to add support for dates, but I'm still not sure on how exactly. The current idea is to add a date_recorded field and optional fields like date_released, and to make the year field deduced its year from them (user-configurable).
Some of the questions left are :
1) is it worth it to support date ranges or list of dates ? that would make it much more complicated so I doubt it, but I don't know if it's used or not
2) find a gui that allow editing the date up to the day, but make it easy to simply enter a year, or a year-month

[dmullinax]

Your question "is it worth it to support date ranges or list of dates ? that would make it much more complicated so I doubt it, but I don't know if it's used or not"

I would suggest yes! 

All of the other music players offer this option (Banshee, Rythmbox, winamp, etc) and I would suggest that this option is the only one missing as opposed to these other players.

Thanks for your reply and taking the time to consider my request.

[Quentin Sculo]

hmm, I haven't checked but I don't think most (if any) players support date ranges and list of dates.

By that I mean something like : record_date=1967–1970,1987  to take a rather extreme example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valleys_of_Neptune or for the first track of it : record_date=1969-04-07,1969-04-09,1969-04-14,1969-05-17

You seem to be more interested in release dates, which I guess wouldn't use date ranges, but might use a list of dates for release in different countries.

So, as I said, I doubt I will support list or ranges of dates, at least at first, as it's not that useful and make things much more complicated. (well there is already support for year ranges for albums, deduced from its tracks, which I guess will need to support dates (month and days) too)