Q: Disabling "Album Sort" tag creation

 

Since upgrading to iTunes 12.4.3.1 on Windows, I noticed that when populating ID tags for tracks in my playlist - for instance, updating the Artist, Album, and Artwork - a new "Album Sort" tag is created as well.

 

Hello Cbal,

iTunes does not automatically create an Album Sort tag.  It only looks like it does. 

Starting in 12.4, if the Album Sort tag is not populated, iTunes will display the Album name in the Album Sort field (minus "a," "an," or "the" in the English version).  It shows in gray to indicate that it is not actually populated.  It is only there to show how the album will sort.

Just to flesh this out a little iTunes has an auto-sort feature that drops the leading articles (a/an/the and equivalents in other languages) for the six sorted fields Album, Album Artist, Artist, Composer, Name & Show. These show in grey if they contain an auto-sort value. A blank value sorts the same way as the main value. Anything manually entered shows in black. The iTunes store will normally include matching completed sort fields in downloads even when these are redundant. I too prefer to clean these out so that the sort field is only populated if it has an effect on the sort order, and that the values show in grey if they are the auto-sort values.

I have a script called AutoSort that can clean out unwanted values in sort fields. It is set to work with all six of the fields, but you can change some flags if you want to leave a particular field untouched for a group of songs. For instance I will actively use the sort fields to put numeric values in numeric order (by padding with leading zeros) so I don't want to overwrite those by mistake.

For the occasional unwanted value I will use the songs view and simply click in the field and delete what is there, the script is useful for bulk updates. Using an external isn't ideal as iTunes doesn't automatically pick up the changes.

tt2