How does one sort music in Rhythmbox?

Question

I quite like Rythmbox and was thinking of keeping it as my default player, but as far as I can tell there's no easy way to sort an album in a playlist by track number, or a genre by artist, etc.

Responses to this post seem to suggest that I have to create a "smart" playlist just to achieve this. I'm familiar with smart playlists from itunes but I'm not thrilled about the idea of creating one every time I want to listen to an album!

Surely there's an easier way. Currently when I click on Track or Title in the playlist nothing happens. Is there some sort of setting or plugin that fixes this, or is it a design choice? (I wasn't particularly fond of Amarok and was hoping for a solution that let's me keep using Rhythmbox).

Answer 1

This problem was posted as a bug over 10 years ago. I'm not sure how a music player that hasn't been able to play albums in a non-random order since 2006 became the default on debian, but it goes without saying that I've removed it. This is disappointing.

I appreciate fossfreedom's answer as well.

Answer 2

Maybe the coverart-browser plugin is what you are looking for...

With the disclaimer that I'm the author...

You mentioned that you wanted to sort by album name, or a genre by artist. By default, the plugin sorts by album name. The pick shows that you can filter by genre and sort by album-artist.

how to install

For RB 2.96 to 2.99

sudo apt-get install git gettext python-mako python-lxml python-gi-cairo python-cairo gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad rhythmbox-plugins

rm -rf ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/coverart_browser
git clone https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-browser.git
cd coverart-browser
./install.sh

For RB 3.0 and later

sudo apt-get install git gettext python3-mako python3-lxml python3-gi-cairo python3-cairo gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad rhythmbox-plugins

rm -rf ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/coverart_browser
git clone https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-browser.git
cd coverart-browser
./install.sh --rb3

You'll also need a second plugin called coverart-search-providers

For RB2.96 to RB2.99

sudo apt-get install git gettext python-mako python-mutagen python-requests python-gdbm python-imaging

rm -rf ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/coverart_search_providers

git clone https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-search-providers.git cd coverart-search-providers ./install.sh

For RB3.0 and later

sudo apt-get install git gettext python3-mako python3-requests python3-gdbm python3-imaging python3-lxml

for Jessie...

sudo apt-get install git gettext python3-mako python3-requests python3-gdbm python3-pil python3-lxml

rm -rf ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/coverart_search_providers
git clone https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-search-providers.git
cd coverart-search-providers
./install.sh --rb3

Finally install mutagenx

---

For other distro's see the project pages on github

• https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-search-providers
• https://github.com/fossfreedom/coverart-browser

Answer 3

i've had the same issue for the last decade with sorting using Rhythmbox, clementine and other players; so I've always replaced them with Amarock, Guayadeque (is that spelled right?), and more recently Juk.

I just decided to give Rhythmbox another chance today, and after my music loaded the 'Artist' column was a disaster again.

Luckily, I didn't give up so easily this time... I right clicked on a track and under 'Properties' I found the 'Sort' input and that was the answer I was looking for. I'm not sure why I never found this the other 20 times, but that's okay.

After fixing the tracks that weren't sorting correctly, I found this post and selected an album from the browser view... Sure enough, some of the tracks were in the wrong place. For some reason, Rhythmbox sorts by 'Genre' before looking at the track numbers, so if you don't have every track on the album marked with the same genre the tracks will be sorted incorrectly.

This is something that should be fixed unless I'm missing something again. There are a few if not many artists who change genre several times on the same album- Ween and Jack White come to mind.