I downloaded Audirvana to try it out before buying. The interface is very nice, but – as far as I can see – the playlist functionality is a basic problem. Playlists are playlists – you put the songs in the order you want. Audirvana appears to want to re-order playlists according to criteria embedded in the ID tags, like track number, or Artist, or whatever. This undoes the basic point of a playlist – your own order. Yes, I could edit the track numbers to correspond to the order I want in a playlist, but this is extra work which most if not all music players do not require. And there is a problem with doing this: if I change the track number for the playlist, it is now the wrong track number when playing that song as part of an album. Basically, the sort order priorities need to include a case where playlists are read as is. These are local imported playlists or new playlists based on local music. There seems to be no way to make this work, and it IS important.
I am either missing something or the software needs to re-prioritize some issues. Maybe it would be possible to assign an order from the now playing list, which allows moving files around, which is then saved. When I try to do that, it isn’t saved. IT is also the case that to get a playlist listed in the usual place in visible form, you have to export it, so you can work with it, as opposed to the hidden version that applies even to local playlists, and should not.
For me,. this is deal breaker on purchase – unless there is a solution.
I can’t see this behaviour in my playlists. I can rearrange tracks and they will keep order. Although it is possible (by clicking the playlist’s table headers) to add sorting by a certain column (an arrow indicates it), this clicking has no effect on playlists. That maybe could be a bug.
No, I don’t even know how to create a smart playlist. The problem – I think – is this: you drag songs from the library to a titled playlist, and it adds them in the order you do that. BUT, I don’t think about the order i want until all of the songs are in there, so I have to edit the order by moving songs around, and deleting some. In other words, I want to edit the playlist. I can export the playlist and edit it in various other software, but what’s the point?
I agree – I try to re-order songs when in a playing now, but that does not stick. The problem seems to be that i want to re-order and edit the playlist once I put all of the songs in there. I start building the playlist by dragging from the library to the titled playlist on the left. But the order i do that in is random. I want to re-order songs after, and delete some. I see no way of doing that.
Have you checked the settings under the “Order criteria” section (I have the German localization, so it might have another name). There you can toggle the switch “Ordering manual playlists, too”. This option should be disabled.