The thing I don't understand is alphabetic ordering of albums, which is the default most everywhere. Albums of a particular artist should obviously be ordered by when they were released (I don't care whether from newest or from oldest).
It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players' authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z.
I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year. Any other options?
It's probably not gonna help you, but that's possible in Music (macOS). There are two sorting criteria, so you could choose to sort by artist first, then for each album of a given artist sort by year. Or you can sort all albums by year, then inside each year alphabetically (album or artist) if that's what you meant.
It's a simple option to implement. But most developers without UI skills don't seem to think about stuff like that.
The problem with that is that things like remasters, special editions, etc. screw up the timeline. Those are listed when they came out but that means they are not in original releases order any longer.
It's possible in mpd+ncmpcpp, but I just encode this in the filesystem hierarchy. My library is basically setup like music/artist/year album/trackno trackname. I had to spend a few hours going through by hand with perl-rename to normalize things, but after that it was great (I don't trust automatic tools to do these things after bad experiences with beetz and similar).
Jellyfin can order albums by year, though I assume many readers of this thread are looking for a self contained player rather than client/server setup like Jellyfin.
It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players' authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z.
I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year. Any other options?