SSA artist/album sort out of order?

[markbowen]

I am not sure if this is a problem with PMM, SSA, or something else. 

When using SSA in the car searching first by artist, then by album under the same artist, some of the albums are out of alphabetical order.  This seems to happen when I have many albums (more than 10) by the same artist.  At first I thought some albums were missing, but I later found them out of order.

For example, under the artist Genesis (don't judge me!), alphabetically the first album should be "Abacab" and the last one "Wind and Wuthering."  However, the first album that comes up is "Live in Montreal."  Other "Live in..." albums are properly sorted, but this one keeps coming in out of order.  I have checked the tags and rebuilt the database a few times, but it won't go where it's supposed to.  (Again, this is not the only example.)

I am using PMM 3.76 on a 160GB drive, with Sam's updated linux kernel.  I cannot switch up to 3.92 because it seems either not to like hacked drives in general, or 160GB drives altogether.  All other operations seem fine.

Anyone else ever have this problem?  Any ideas what might be causing it?

[markbowen]

OK, thanks anyway, I figured this out myself!

If anyone else experiences this problem, it is caused when you have an album with the same name by more than one artist.  In my example, I have an album by Genesis named "Live in Montreal" and I also have one by David Bowie with the same name.  The database apparently treats that as one album by various artists, so it shows up out of order under both artists.  I realized the same thing was happening with my actual "various artists" albums.

It would be nice if the database could recognize and separate albums by reading all the tags.  If the year and track numbers were taken into consideration, there would be considerably less chance of this happening. 

Anyway, for now the cheap fix for this is to just give different names to the albums.  Not a problem for generic live shows, but a can be a problem if you are a purist about album titles.