I think a useful feature would be the ability to define Smart Playlist order by Rule / Rule Group order. Maybe just an option that says something like “rule order”.
Right now when you add a rule / rule group, that item gets added to the top of the rule list. With this feature any new rule / rule group would be added to the bottom of the list. Meaning, any new rule or rule group takes the next place in line. So the list is created with the order going from top to bottom of the rule / rule group list. Like so;
A better option might just be to finally implement filtering in playlists like you can in Libraries, and one of the filter options being, “sort by Rule order”. And that sorts it top to bottom how it was created.
You can already do that. The sorting order you select in the marked drop-down becomes part of the smart playlist.
No, you can’t. These are the options. There is no option for Rule order.
Sorry, I’m confused about what you are requesting.
What shall be sorted? The media items or the filter criteria?
Like this.
Right now if you click add rule / rule group - that item is added at the top above the previously added rule / rule group. That is because right now, Rule order is arbitrary and doesn’t matter because the order is controlled by the filters at the top like you pointed out.
With this, new rules / rule groups would be added below the previously added one on the screen. And the top to bottom order would be the order of the playlist. Like in my screenshot.
Sorting the filter criteria essentially sorts the media. It would basically work like - look for this criteria, then this, then this.
A use case would be;
You have a published list like Rolling Stone’s Top 40 Albums of 2007. You could create a smart playlist with each album as a Rule. Then set the sort order to “Rules”. That would have the Smart Playlist run each Rule in a set order. Then, as you added more of the 40 albums to your library, they would just fall into place in the playlist without you ever needing to do anything. You wouldn’t have to adjust the playlist ever. It would just all be dynamic.
Essentially an option called something like “Rules”. Then the playlist processes each rule in order. So whatever you had at the top is 1 and it just assigns a number / index to each rule starting from top to bottom behind the scenes.
