Sort albums by full release date (from Originally Available field) in Artist View, not just year?

General Discussions
1

Is it possible to sort albums by their full release date when in artist view? I’m running PMS on Ubuntu and have edited Preferences.xml to include AlbumSort=“year:asc” which works great for the year but infuriatingly, it then seems to organise the albums within that year in a seemingly random order, so it looks like this:

TITLE                                    ORIGINALLY AVAILABLE
Action [7"]                               1975-07-04
Fox On The Run [7"]               1975-03-07
Give Us A Wink                      1976-02-16
Off the Record                        1977-04-01
Fever Of Love [7"]                  1977-02-25
Stairway To The Stars [7"]      1977-07-29

The sort album fields are all blank. As you can see from the final 3, it isn’t in any chronological nor alphabetical order so I’m struggling to see how they’re being sorted internally after the year.

If I add the date to the Sort Album field in the same format (YYYY-MM-DD) then the issue resolves itself, but that’s a lot of extra work and duplication of information.

I can’t find a list of possible values for the AlbumSort setting in Preferences.xml, but does anyone know if there’s a value for the full release date, rather than just year? If not, should Plex not be sorting the albums by the full release date by default anyway? Is this a bug?

Cheers,

Pete

2

Try AlbumSort="originallyAvailableAt:asc"

3

@lcharlick said:
Try AlbumSort="originallyAvailableAt:asc"

That’s done it, thank you so much! I did try things like “originallyavailable”, “originally_available” and “OriginallyAvailable” but just couldn’t hit the magic combination. Thanks again :slight_smile:

4

I have been wrestling with this too but I cannot find where to make the change under Windows. Please could someone point me in the right direction. Thanks.

5

In Windows the Advanced Settings are stored in the Windows Registry.

6

Thanks for that. I created a new string AlbumSort and gave it the value year:month:desc (which seemed to be the best guess given the info in that thread) but it doesn’t seem to work. Did I guess the value wrong?

7

Look at the “accepted answer” post at the top of this thread for the correct value.

8

@beckfield said:
Look at the “accepted answer” post at the top of this thread for the correct value.

It is no longer relevant if you have updated Plex Server to 1.4.1 or above.

Album sort is now selectable in the GUI

  1. for each music library edit your library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab

  2. the library sort oder can be overridden for any album artist by editing the artist

Unfortunately, it inherited the old issue that sorting is only done by ‘year’, not by ‘date’.
This has already been filed as a bug.

9

So has the support for the “Albumsort = originallyAvailableAt” preference actually been removed? If not, could it still work?

10

@beckfield said:
So has the support for the “Albumsort = originallyAvailableAt” preference actually been removed? If not, could it still work?

It never worked. It was always Albumsort = year