Preferred Sort is a way to create custom song groups in the Music Wheel without rearranging the physical location of the songs on your hard drive. There are plenty of reasons to do this, for example a folder of routine songs, combining folders, a folder of your favorite songs, etc.

Step 1. How to create the file

Create a text file in the Other folder of your theme.

• If you would like to use more than one Preferred Sort at a time or change the sort with lua, choose a name and prefix it with SongManager . (Examples: SongManager Special.txt, SongManager Basic.txt, SongManager MyAwesomeCustomSort.txt)
• If you only want to use one preferred sort and you want it set by default, name it SongManager PreferredSongs.txt.

Step 2. Valid preferred sort entries

Song folders in the preferred sort are optional, but you can use them if you'd like. To add a song group, put --- and then the name of your group, then put the songs you want on the next lines.

For a song you can do SongGroup/SongFolder or just SongFolder, where SongGroup is the name of the song group and SongFolder is the folder the song is in.

To add every single song in a group, do SongGroup/*

Due to how the music wheel is designed you cannot have the same song in more than one group, but you can have multiple of the same song in the same group. The technical reason for this is that the preferred sort reader function creates an array containing every song that would be used in the preferred sort (including duplicates), but the function that creates the folders in the music wheel iterates through the array and returns the first preferred folder it finds that contains the song. The other technical reason is that the music wheel is designed to take an array of songs then sort it for different sorts then generate the folders for the sorted array afterwards.

A group named "Unlocks" will be pushed to the bottom of the groups list. Groups with 0 valid songs will not be added.

Example File

---Special Songs
01 Special/*
02 Mixtapes/*
---StepMania
StepMania 5/Springtime

In this example every song from the folders 01 Special and 02 Mixtapes is being added to a group named Special Songs and the song Springtime in the StepMania 5 folder is being added to a group named StepMania.

Step 3. Setting the wheel to preferred sort

Manual way

In ScreenSelectMusic, run this lua somewhere. (NameOfMySort is what you named your preferred sort, of course. In this example it would be loading Other/SongManager NameOfMySort.txt)

SCREENMAN:GetTopScreen():GetMusicWheel():ChangeSort("SortOrder_Preferred");
SONGMAN:SetPreferredSongs("NameOfMySort.txt");

Metrics way

Make sure your text file in the Other folder of your theme is named SongManager PreferredSongs.txt.

In the [ScreenSelectMusic] section of your metrics.ini, add DefaultSort="Preferred".

Bonus: Using lua to write custom preferred sorts

There are more novel ways to use preferred sorts than just making a preferred sort by hand and then setting it. For example: a preferred sort that contains only easy songs

(TODO)