We tried this afternoon to find out why the genos sort the files differently than the tyros or the computer.
...
With Letters like ö-ü-ä, the genos have Problemes. So "Über den Wolken" is right behind "Aber Dich".
First things first : Sorting files alphabetically on the Genos is not reliable when accents are involved… Even worst, a lot of people asked for a way to sort Playlists by song name, but it doesn't seems to be possible à present time (firmware v1.30)...
As a side note, sorting text is a complex subject for a computer, and inside the Genos, there's a computer (running a Linux OS).
(
Warning : geek speak is following, feel free to skip reading
)
Simply put, for a computer each letter 'map' to a number, and initially the (
mostly) U.S. Operating System (DOS, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and so on…) could only represents unaccentuated 'latin' characters (a, b, c, d, … x, y, z, A, B, C, ..., X, Y, Z).
In the 60's, one of the first (and limited) 'computer friendly' text ordering system was created and known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII). In this system the 'a' letter is coded as 97 , 'b' is 98, c is 99, and so on… the uppercase 'A' is coded 65, 'B' is 66 , and so on… So, on those early systems the fastest way to sort a text list was simply by their 'number code' … but since the uppercase letters have lower numbers than lowercase letters, the 'natural sort' was:
- A
- Atlas
- B
- Bug
- ....
- Z
- Zebra
- a
- atlas
- b
.....
Of course, even at that time, it was possible to sort text while ignoring the letter case, but it required more computing power
Some years later, the U.S. developers noticed that somewhere around the world, some languages had 'accents' (also known as 'diacritics') , and they extended the ASCII table to incorporate those diacritics… but of course they could not 'insert' the 'é' letter just between 'e' and 'f', so they added those 'diacritics' above the number 127... But again, if a user wanted to sort 'naturally' a list of word in its native language, more computing power was required ! (and each language has its own 'rules' concerning letter ordering… see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order )
Again, some years later, non-latin characters were taken into account, and the UNICODE standard was created. This standard is nowadays the 'norm' and incorporate several thousand characters - and even Emojis - (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters)
This seriously complicate the 'sort process' of a list of words, since each language has its own rules of ordering (this is known as 'Collation' in computer science, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation ).
That's why most computer operating system allows to choose a language-specific 'sort collation'.
Unfortunately, on the Genos, we can't choose the sort collation, that's why your list seems to be strangely sorted …
The same thing can happens between two computers if they have different 'collation' (culture-specific settings) , and is a very common source of trouble on data-exchange systems and Databases
My 0.2$
Benoit