If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Oh, they did.

Question

Having struggled with several TVs from the early days, each s/w update seemed to get closer to working how they ought. In particular, content should appear basically as it does in iTunes which is after all THE maintenance program to use to control all the content. I refer to sorting. iTunes introduces the 'Sort' tags, with which it is possible to have it display everything in your preferred order. I have all my artists sorting by last name and an artist's albums are shown in release date order. iTunes is fantastic and makes this trivial (apart from the sheer quantity which is hardly Apple's fault). Then you try and play it from an TV and it all goes to pieces.
Finally, during the v2 updates, they got this right and the TV would finally respect your carefully created sort tags and compilation artists were kept out of the main artist list, just like in iTunes. This can only get better I thought.
Oh dear.
v3.01 has BROKEN it all again. I am simply at a loss to understand how Apple can have screwed up so badly on this one. Many users seem to be suffering hangs and crashes (I myself have had a few) and overall it seems just so slow. But there's worse.
In the Artists list, I can see some artists for which I only have 1 or 2 tracks and they are both assuredly marked as 'Compilations'. THEY SHOULD NOT BE THERE. These should be all be listed elsewhere under Compilations. Bizarrely, most compilation artists are, but some have escaped into the main artist list. How crummy can you get.
And that's not all.
The artist list is again sorting by the Artist tag and NOT the Sort Artist tag. Likewise albums for an artist are sorting alphabetically again and not using the Sort Album tag. This was SORTED and now they've thrown it out and gone back to the nonsense they had before they fixed it.
This is truly depressing. The TV has such potential, but I'm not convinced it'll ever be right if they continue with this disastrous level of incompetence. Jeez, I'd expect a high school kid to make a better job of it.

Answer 1

I think many of you guys are missing the point which is nothing to do with the value or importance of correctly cataloguing your music collection. Personally I don't give 2 hoots about ratings, or beat (or other tags I consider utterly worthless), but if Apple implement it on one platform then it **** well ought to be the same on their other platforms that use the SAME data and THAT is the point.
Having said that, I cannot see how anyone can be so unconcerned about the sorting of the data since if the artists (or other primary data tags) are badly sorted when displayed in a list then it makes it kinda hard to find what you want and rather defeats the whole point of having all the music on the computer in the first place. But again, I am not arguing this point here.
What I am saying is that in iTunes, a list of Artists gets sorted by the Sort Artist tag (if empty it uses the Artist tag and drops A, The etc) - FACT. TV v1 ignores the Sort Artist tag and sorts any artist list by the Artist tag so e.g. Mark Knopfler is sorted under M which is quite clearly nonsense. During the v2 series of software (v2.4 IIRC), they finally get it right and the Aritsts list then sorts correctly by the Sort Artist tag. They also group compilation artists at this time (as per iTunes) so that the main artists list is less cluttered. Now we get v3 and they've forgotten all about getting v2 correct and not only are we stuck with sorting by the Artist tag again but also compilation artists are 'leaking' into the main artist list. Aarrgghh.
I have over 1,000 artists with over 20,000 tracks and if the sorting is not correctly done it makes using the TV (or whatever device) a misery.
The issue here is that Apple know what is required, that's why they put it into iTunes. They then take WAY too long to implement it on the TV (don't get me started on the iPods and Front Row) and just when we finally get a decent implementation, they bollox it up again in the next 'upgrade'. This is simply incompetence of the highest order.
As a database developer I understand about the care required when displaying data, but it's not hard to get it right. Just use the appropriate field when applying the sort - it's not rocket science and indeed they've done a great job with iTunes. But when it comes to the TV, they seem to have NO idea about what is and is not appropriate. When you want to play all the tracks for a selected artist, you get an alphabetical list. What stupidity is that. Why would ANYONE want them played alphabetically, you just wouldn't. I want them in album/track no. order as that makes sense to me (albums sorted by the Sort Album field of course) and for those who have no interest in the concept of 'Album' (I recognise that not everyone wants them ordered the same way as I do) they can simply select Shuffle - no other options make any sense. But what do we get - alphabloodybetical. This is just so stupid I am at a loss to comprehend how they could have sat around at a table and thought, "hmm, yes, let's sort the tracks alphabetically, that's a good idea". Aaaaarrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!