Feature Request: Sorting Playlists

[dgruss]

ponilek on discord was using the inherent ordering that USDX had on older versions, which was derived from the global song order. Now in current versions this is not possible. Playlists are played either in the order defined in the Playlist, or shuffled, which is consistent with what you would expect from a playlist.

Now one can easily sort the playlist by opening it in an editor and sorting it there. The question is whether the game should provide, for convenience, a feature to sort a playlist. This could be through the song menu, where it doesn't burden the rest of the UI.
We could offer the same sort properties as for the main song list, to minimize the new complexity introduced.

I'm not sure... Should the game support this?

[barbeque-squared]

inherent ordering that USDX had on older versions, which was derived from the global song order

But it still has this? If you don't have #FixedOrder: On in the playlist file it will just sort it in the same order you would encounter the songs if you just went through the entire songlist one-by-one, which it has always done like that?

also

on discord

not anywhere I can see (or find).

If someone really wants playlists to be sorted (for some reason) different from how the main songlist is sorted and (for some reason) literally #FixedOrder: On is not what they want for it, then they should at the very least describe how this is supposed to be portable across systems.

[dgruss]

discord DMs ;)

so there are currently a few little bugs around playlists still that we discovered in the discussion

2026-04-20.19-08-10.mp4.h264.mp4

and

2026-04-20.19-04-45.mp4.h264.mp4

You notice one little bug immediately when watching the two videos: Fixed order off, it always starts at song 2? --> that should not happen

Then Ponilek also sent me this one, which is also weird but contains a few more fixes (it is the beta PR):

2026-04-20.22-20-54.mp4.h264.mp4

It always jumps back to song 1 - this also should not happen, and I had difficulties reproducing it. The playlist had songs that were not present in the song collection but even with the same setup I could not reproduce it.

Still, I investigated that and found some more bugs (scroll position not correctly updated, no new randomness when playlist is reopened so R would go through exactly the same sequence you just went through before, spurious playlist advance always going to song 2), that I addressed here: #1241

Looks like this with this PR:

2026-04-21.21-10-55.mp4.h264.mp4

I would say, everything is fine now:

• Fixed Order On --> we go through the songs start to end, in order
• Fixed Order Off --> we go to a random song

Now this looks all fine, but the behavior that Ponilek had in an older version of USDX, namely that we get the same order as in Fixed Order Off, but the behavior from Fixed Order On, so that we go through the songs start to end (by whatever sorting is configured) is then not possible anymore -- and i think this is what we intended:

Fixed Order On treats the playlist as a playlist --> things stay in order

Fixed Order Off treats the playlist as a song collection that has no particular order --> randomized

Now the game offers no options to modify the order of a playlist other than creating a new playlist and adding the songs exactly in the order you want to have afterwards. Here we could provide the option to sort the playlist, then everyone would be able to get the behavior they want.

[dgruss]

@Ponilek also mentioned that, as we might remove the jukebox mode anyway (see #1193 and #1195 ), and the jukebox mode currently has a sort feature, adding that sort feature to playlists would make a lot of sense as well. i would try to find a nice spot where to add it