Sorting criteria
This wiki contains the developer documentation for AntennaPod. If you are a user and you are looking for help, have a look at our website!
This text is only a draft, opened for discussion. It is written as if it were the final user documentation, but its first use will be for specifications in order to develop these features.
When AntennaPod puts the episodes in the queue, they have to be sorted. There are several ways to do this, they are explained below:
The default way to sort episodes is by date: from oldest to newest. Old episodes will be played before newer ones. Each time AntennaPod downloads an episode, it will usually be added at the end of the queue.
The date used is the publication date of the episode. This means that if you download an episode which has been published a long time ago, it may land at the top of the queue and not at the end.
With the advanced sort, you can select the sorting criterion and order (ascending or descending). Available sorting criteria are:
- Date (Asc/Desc) - Order by episode publication date (case insensitive)
- Duration (Asc/Desc) - Order by episode duration
- Episode Title (Asc/Desc) - Order by episode title (case insensitive).
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Feed Title (Asc/Desc) - Order by feed title (case insensitive).
NOTE: There is no secondary sort field involved here, so episodes within a feed will be grouped together (within these groups following previous sorting; see stable sorting below). Perhaps this sort should involve a second field (e.g. Date:Asc) so that resulting episode order is deterministic. - Random - Rearranges the items in the queue randomly.
- Smart Shuffle (Asc/Desc) - Orders podcasts by publication date, alternating between feeds (in round-robin fashion) to avoid clusters of consecutive episodes from a single feed.
- Feed Priority - (implemented?) Order according to the priority you gave to the feed, highest first.
- Media Type - (implemented?) Orders by media type (e.g. Audio vs. Video), preserving previous sorting criterion as a second key.
Stable sorting: The sort functions are stable, meaning that you can sort the playlist eg. by date and afterwards by feed title (unknown if a feature or coincidence). Whenever a new sorting mechanism is chose, it preserves previous sorting order whenever items fall in the same group.
A switch is available to invert the chosen criterion. For example, if you choose to sort by date and invert the sort, you'll have newer episodes first.
With the expert mode, you can apply one or several sorting criteria, and order them. With the expert mode, you can for example:
- Play episodes by date (newer first) then by size (shortest first).
Once AntennaPod sorted the list according to these criteria, it is possible to manually change the order. To do this, tap the zone at the right of the main list name, you'll have a small menu appear. Then you can drag and drop episodes individually to make the perfect list.
Each feed has a priority, which is a number from 0 to 100. By default it is set at 50, but you can adjust it.
A high number gives a high priority. Priority is used for 2 things:
- Downloading: for both feed update and episode download, AntennaPod will first treat high priority feeds, then process lower ones.
- Episodes sorting: in the advanced or expert sort mode, AntennaPod can use this priority.
A feed with a priority of 0 is disabled: AntennaPod will not update it, and will not download any episode. This is a way to temporarily disable or unsubscribe.
You can mark feeds as favorites.
- Downloading: for both feed update and episode download, AntennaPod will first treat favorite feeds.
- Episodes sorting: in the advanced or expert sort mode, AntennaPod will show this on top.