Playlist Name Sort Order on iPod G5.5

(tags iPod, iTunes, Ruby, programming)

I took the time to manually figure out the sort order of playlists names on the iPod G5.5. From left to right (with some ASCII values in hexadecimal):

Seems as if the iPod is pulling the ' (quote) and - (dash) higher up, while pushing the + (plus), < (left angle bracket), = (equal sign), > (right angle bracket), and \ (backslash) down. Then numbers and alphabet come later, respectively. Finally, any name prefixed with spaces are ignored, and hiragana comes before katakana, while finally kanji picks up the end. As far as I can tell, smart and manual playlists share the same order, regardless of type.

I used the following script to create the temporary manual playlists. If this looks like a straight copy and paste of the SDK provided script, you'd be pretty close.

# Ruby 1.8 script
require 'win32ole'

iTunesApp = WIN32OLE.new("iTunes.Application")
mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist
tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks

def createAllAscii( iTunesApp, foldername, track )
  source = iTunesApp.LibrarySource

  # if exist, add to that folder, else create
  unless (folder = source.Playlists.ItemByName( foldername ))
    folder = iTunesApp.CreateFolder( foldername )
  end

  # need a track so that playlist is synced to iPod
  0x20.upto(0x7e) do |chr|
    plname = yield chr
    # show some status
    print "creating playlist '#{plname}'..."
    albumPlaylist = folder.CreatePlaylist( plname )
    albumPlaylist.AddTrack( track )
    puts "done!"
  end
end

# any track is fine
atrack = tracks.ItemByName("Stage 4 - Assault! -")

createAllAscii( iTunesApp, "sortTest", atrack ) 
  { |ch| "#{ch.chr}sorttesting" }
createAllAscii( iTunesApp, "sortTest", atrack ) 
  { |ch| "a#{ch.chr}sorttesting" }

Now armed with this info, I'm gonna group my "Imported" and "Played", "Rated", "Not Rated", "Year" playlists with some funky symbols at the beginning. Happy joy.