What is the issue with file organization in Vista and how can it be resolved?

[leroyjenkens]

This thing is a mess. XP file organization was fine, but since when something works fine, people like to fix it (make it not work anymore), they made something simple into another reason to pull your hair out. I'm trying to put my music files in descending order for duration. I had to add a duration tab, because there wasn't one there before. But now that I added it, clicking on it does nothing. I can click on the name tab and it will organize in alphabetical order. When I click on duration, it changes it into a random mess. Does duration mean "random" and not the length of the song like I thought? If I click on duration again, it doesn't flip it around and put it in ascending order, like it does by clicking on the name tab. Instead, it just stays in the same random order.
Sort by duration does this, so does stack by duration. They're the exact same thing as far as I can tell. Let me try group by duration. Oh, it does the same thing as the other two.
I try to view details to show me how long each song is under the duration tab, but it shows nothing under the duration tab.
I've gotten one of these options to show me the length of the songs before, although it was pretty poor. Most were in descending order for duration, but there were some chunks at the bottom and top that were not included in the main order. But each time I've gotten it to do that, I had to struggle with this thing, trying various options until I finally got it to work. This time it's just not showing up.

 

[slider142]

You're looking for "Length", not "Duration". Pretty confusing.

 

[leroyjenkens]

You're looking for "Length", not "Duration". Pretty confusing.

Thanks. Got it pretty quickly doing it by length. Funny thing is I've never done it by length, every time I've gotten it to show the numbers, it's been with duration. So duration is just the stubborn version of length?

 

[slider142]

Thanks. Got it pretty quickly doing it by length. Funny thing is I've never done it by length, every time I've gotten it to show the numbers, it's been with duration. So duration is just the stubborn version of length?

Duration is an undocumented attribute; in no official documentation can I find what it is supposed to refer to. It is possibly meant to be populated only at the discretion of the end user or file creator, such as the 'author' attribute.