Browsing your library

The Library tab is home base. My Library opens with six ways in: Albums, Artists, Tracks, Playlists, Genres, and Import Music. Below them, Recently Played and Recently Added put your latest listening one tap away.

Albums: Grid and crate

The Albums screen has two personalities, and a button in the top bar flips between them.

Grid view is the classic wall of covers. Two columns on iPhone, more on iPad, with the artist under each title. Albums with more than one version in your library show a small count badge on the cover.

Crate view is the one you’ll show people. Albums stand up like records in a crate, and you flip through them with your thumb. Drag down to move forward, up to go back. Flick and the crate keeps moving, settling with a light tick as each album lands up front. Tap the front album to open it, or use the play button and + menu right on the card to start it, queue it, or add it to a playlist without breaking stride.

Your view choice sticks. Pick a mode once and BitDek remembers it.

Artists and tracks

Artists shows as a list by default, with a grid option behind the same kind of toggle. Tap through an artist to their albums, sorted newest first by release date, with Play and Shuffle for their whole catalog.

Tracks is your entire collection as one list. Every row carries a menu with the full set of actions: play, queue, favorite, playlist.

Sorting

Every view has a sort menu, and each remembers its own choice.

• Albums and Tracks: Artist, Title, Date Added, Most Played, Last Played
• Artists: Name, Most Played, Last Played
• Genres: Name, Most Albums, Most Tracks

Tap the active option again to reverse direction. Sorting by Artist keeps albums and tracks in proper album order underneath, so collections read the way collections should.

Leading articles

The Beatles file under B. The Rolling Stones sit under R, where you would look for them.

BitDek sorts past a leading The, A, or An on artists, albums, and tracks. Record shops have filed their racks this way for decades, and it puts things where your hand already goes.

The article stays on screen. Only the filing position changes.

Turning it off

Settings has a Library section with Ignore Articles When Sorting. It is on by default. Turn it off for strict alphabetical order and every screen returns to filing The Beatles under T.

Nothing about this is written into your library. It applies as your collection is sorted, so switching back and forth costs nothing and changes no data.

Your sort tags always win

If a file carries a sort tag, BitDek uses it exactly as written. A sort tag beats the setting and the article rule together, and it beats anything BitDek would otherwise work out for itself.

That gives you a per-item override. Set an artist’s sort name to match the display name, article included, and that artist files under the article while everything else carries on ignoring them. The band The The is the case that makes this obvious, and a sort name of “The The” is how you keep it under T.

See How BitDek reads your tags for the sort fields in each format, and Editing metadata in BitDek for setting one in the app.

The limits of the rule

Only English articles are stripped, so Die Antwoord stays under D and Los Lobos under L. That is deliberate rather than an oversight. An article belongs to the name rather than to whatever language your phone is set to, and “die” and “los” are ordinary words elsewhere in the world, so stripping them would file a lot of bands in the wrong place. Non-English collections are covered by sort tags, which win outright.

Beyond that, BitDek only ever removes one article, only at the very front, and only when a space follows it. Nothing mid-name is touched, and a band actually called The keeps its name for sorting, since there would be nothing left to file it under.

On update day

Version 1.3.4 introduced this, and libraries whose files carry no sort tags reorder the first time you open the app after updating. If your shelf looks unfamiliar that morning, this is why. Everything is still there and your artists are simply filing themselves somewhere else.

Filters

The filter button opens three sections that work together:

• Favorites shows only what you’ve hearted. See Favorites.
• Genres is a multi-select list with a choice of Match Any (a match on any selected genre is enough) or Match All (only items carrying every selected genre).
• Release Date offers recent years and whole decades, using the original release year when your tags have one.

Sections combine, so “favorites, jazz, from the 1970s” is three taps. Active filters appear as removable capsules above your library, with Clear All in the filter sheet when you want a clean slate. Filters persist until you change them, and each view keeps its own.