topic Re: Alphabetical order in Your Library

Alphabetical order

lorenzo_btt — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 14:34:55 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Italy

Device

Xiaomi Note 9 Pro, Surface Pro X, Windows pc

Operating System

Android, Windows 10

My Question or Issue

Hi, I am writing this to complain about the quiet (sneaky?) removal of the ability to sort the songs in my playlists in alphabetical order on all Spotify clients (Android, web app, Windows desktop app). I have a few thousand albums which I like to keep organized by genre (one playlist for each), with all my albums categorized alphabetically within these.

After the last update the feature enabling me to "arrange alphabetically/by album/by artist" the content of my playlists has vanished, as mentioned above, from my Android Spotify client, and from both the desktop and web app on my computers.

As such Spotify is now rearranging all my stuff according to its own order (recently played items first in playlist menu, newly added albums last inside the playlists), which is both stupid and irritating as I now have to scroll all the way down long lists of items in order to get to the album I want, and no, I'm not going to use the built-in search function as it's implementation is terrible at best, and it almost never finds what one is looking for. And what happens if I don't remember the name of the band or the title of the album? Back to scrolling by hand I guess...

To cut a long story short: I understand that Spotify is trying to give its casual users the possibility to enjoy their client as a web radio of sorts, by letting it stream popular stuff automagically, but this does not mean that you can strip discerning users of basic choices related to the organization of their personal lists, especially if such choices are paid for.

I am of course ready to cancel my premium/family subscription and migrate my collections somewhere else (e.g. YouTube Music whence I originally came from, which is doing the exact opposite you have done, by finally introducing the ability to categorize one's material as they damn well please), if the sorting options won't be reintroduced accross all Spotify clients in the (very) near future.

Re: Alphabetical order

dinomight — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 16:49:00 GMT

Hey @lorenzo_btt,

Welcome to the community, and thanks for your post! It doesn't seem to currently be possible to sort playlists in the web client, but you should see sorting options in the Android and Desktop versions of the app. On Android, this only works on playlists you've created, while on desktop it should work on all of them.

For Android, if you'll drag down on your screen, you should see the filtering options right above the playlist artwork. It will look like the following screenshot.

Tap the filters button, and then you should see a menu like below, and you can choose one of the available sorting options for your playlist.

On desktop, you can sort by either clicking on the column headers of your playlists or by clicking the button in the screenshot below, which provides the additional option of sorting by artist.

Re: Alphabetical order

lorenzo_btt — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:08:10 GMT

Thanks a lot Dinomight, this really helped especially with the Android app. I would not have found the filtering option for the life of me...

Re: Alphabetical order

dinomight — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:10:24 GMT

Glad I could help! I totally understand; that section is definitely a bit hidden on Android if you don't know where to look.

Re: Alphabetical order

CoffeeBrewer_ — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 12:47:57 GMT

What about alphabetical sorting on iOS/iPhones?