Order of Multiple Episodes In Playlist

[jayf]

I'm not sure if this is a bug, a feature or just my lack of understanding.

Some of my podcasts give me multiple episodes at a time, for example the Lehrer News Hour. I have the podcast set to download the oldest episodes first such that when all the episodes have finished downloading they are in the correct order when viewed in the podcast window. But PodTrapper adds the episodes to my playlist in the same order such that they end up in the reverse order in the playlist. Should I just reverse the order that they are downloaded in the podcast to fix this issue? I would think you would want them in the same order in the playlist that they are in the podcast itself.

Thanks
- J

[arkolbus]

How are the following settings set?
"Auto Add to Playlists" under the offending podcast
"Auto Sort" (under edit playlist)
Episode sort settings (under "Add/Sort Episodes" within the playlist)

The Lehrer News Hour podcast seems to have episodes time-stamped, so if your playlist is auto-sorting and you sort episodes by ascending date, it should playback oldest to newest.

[jayf]

Thanks for those tips. I had Auto Add to Playlists set correctly. I did not have Auto Sort in edit playlist set so I did change that. I tried to change the sort order of my playlist from "Playback Priority, Episode Date, Podcast Name" to "Episode Date, Playback Priority, Podcast Name" but it does not save/stick. Anyway after making this Auto Sort change it still did not order the episodes correctly in the playlist.

[arkolbus]

I would expect that If you had auto-add to playlist, but not playlist auto-sort, that the episodes would be added to the bottom of the playlist in the order in which they were downloaded. It's strange that wasn't the actual behavior. Are you sure the episodes were getting downloaded from old to new? The order in which they're displayed on the podcast view may not be the same as the download order. You'd have to watch the download screen carefully for that.

In order to get the episode sort settings to stick, you need to hit Menu->"Add/Sort Items". If you hit the escape key to return to the playlist, it will exit out with no prompt and no save. This should probably be filed as a bug report.

When sorting by episode date, is it ascending (old to new) or descending (new to old)?

If you don't use the playback priority, you can remove that sort criteria and try sorting by date, podcast name, then "Episode order". According to the wiki, this is the order in which the episodes appear in the feed, from top to bottom. For the Lehrer podcast, the newest episode is on top, so you'd want to sort descending (bottom to top, oldest to newest). This setting would affect all other podcasts that give you multiple episodes per day.

Marcus: Does sort by episode date consider the full timestamp (if available) from the feed, or just the date?

[marwatk]

Should consider the full timestamp, but the parsing is sketchy at best. That podcast uses proper dates, so it should be parsing properly. I'll run it through the debugger this weekend on this podcast to see for sure.

I also put the lack of a confirmation dialog on the sort window on the list as well.

-Marcus

[jayf]

With the new version I'm able to change the sort order of the playlist and save it, thanks! It even re-sorts the list automatically based on the settings. I find that sorting by episode date descending seems to work the way you would expect.. Playing them in chronological order oldest to newest. Make sense? I would think it should be ascending but as long as it works I don't care.

Thanks Marcus!
- J