For my solo gig I would like to bring up a smart setlist of all active songs, but to be able to sort them by Artist name, not just alphabetically. When I do that now, I have a list of all songs, all artists starting with A and B, etc. Not useful as it is
Literally that - a Smart List, filtered by Active Equals [tick], sorted by Artist, Ascending.
Ah, now I get it - you want a section per artist. That's harder work.
If you don't have too many artists, a Pause labelled per artist and a constructed Set of each. Sadly not a Smart list.
You could make a setlist (from scratch) and, as you Add Songs, sort that popup by Artist and add them all.
When they appear in your setlist, add pauses at each artist change. You could add the text to those pauses or not.
Or possibly, following that thought, include an empty song, per-artist, which will appear in that list. The problem here is that you can only sort by one thing, so the songs won't be sorted within each artist - unless you also have a Custom Field, containing Artist and Title, to sort by.
So I've run out of talent. Sorry.
Strange. On song does this natively, if you sort by artist, it actually sorts by artist, not first initial. Seems like a basic need, does it not? For my use it has to be a so called smart list, I have 800 songs and at least 70 artists
Even stranger is that, within the browser, the Artists smart list behaves much closer to the way I need it. Artist names in blue rows.
You're right - I just checked. Sorry for misleading. I had that problem somewhere!
The songs are sorted by the complete artist name, but the song list is grouped by the artist first initial rather than the full artist name because on mobile devices, that would create an index of shortcuts that would be so large it would make the song list barely usable. So in the current setup, if you want to pick a song by the Beatles for example, you could click B in the index and then scroll to the Beatles songs in the B section.