Sort your Winamp playlist by artist or by track title easily without plugins


Winamp provides a sorting function, as you may know, by title, filename and path. If your playlist consists of files that belong to folders reflecting albums and artists you don’t have a problem, selecting the “path” option will give you a list sorted by artist and album. What if all your playlist entries come from one and the same large folder containing various artists and albums?

It is still easy to fulfill your sorting needs, just taking advantage of the native Winamp options, without resorting to any plugin at all. Open the Preferences of Winamp and go to “Titles”, then at the right to the section “Advanced Title Formatting”. You will find there a textbox named “Advanced title display format”, containing a “formula” that builds the way Winamp presents in the playlist various info about a track.

To sort your playlist by artist, just put the %artist% field name before the %title% field. Do the opposite to sort by title. For example, the following line displays first the artist, adding finally the album title: $if2(%artist% – %title%,$filepart(%filename%)) – [%album%]. Then in the Winamp playlist sorting options select the option to sort list by title, and enjoy!

Check also this post explaining Winamp’s Advanced Title Formatting tags.