Q: iOS 10 Music App Sorting

I came here looking for the answer to this question also.  The ability to sort artist albums by year is now missing in iOS 10 music app.  This is a deal-breaker for me and I can't see myself using the app if I can only sort by album title.  Apple... please bring back the ability to sort by year!

Strongly agree - for MANY people sorting Albums in both Albums view and Artists view by Album Year / Release Date make SO MUCH MORE SENSE than having them completely out of order based on the apparently-now-non-adjustable alphabetic sort order.

Is it so difficult to allow users the option to sort albums via year / release date OR album title?

I usually sort by song. It's not even an option now! I went back to ios 9. Can't stand the music app.

I'm not even able to restore my iPod to factory settings anymore either. Hopefully an update will fix this!

I went to Settings / Music and changed "Sort songs and albums" to "By title" instead of "By artist".

Now, when I from Library choose an artist the albums show up in ascending order by year! Also when I choose a composer or genre it works (I use custom genres to sort some artists, a convenient way to group for example The Forminx, Aphrodite's Child, Jon & Vangelis etc all as "Vangelis" to get a complete discography).

I hope the above works for you too. I keep my music in iTunes on my iMac and sync from there. Note: I am careful to fill out "Sort / Album - Sort as" under "Show info" on all songs in iTunes. I put the year there too in front of the title; for example, for Vangelis Oceanic album it says Sort as "1996 Oceanic". I did this because I was annoyed with iTunes sorting getting worse, and found it helps in IOS Music too. I think this is why this works, that entry is the title Music looks for when sorting.

Some reservation about the wording in English in different Settings… my IOS is in Swedish… but you'll figure it out. :-)

Changing Settings / Music "Sort songs and albums" to "By title" instead of "By artist" doesn't work.  The only reason it works for you is because you edited the title to include the year in the front of it.  I'm not going to screw up my collection of 20,000 songs by putting the year in the title of all of them.

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

No, I haven't added the year to the album title or screwed up anything. Albums show with only the title as they should. Sorry if I was not clear.

What I've done is to add the year in the sorting option under album info in iTunes. This is an option to refine sorting. It is hidden in the metadata and only seen by iTunes / Music app.

It is easily done at the album level in iTunes (not necessary to do for each song individually). Less quickly for a very large collection, obviously…

It's a workaround, some effort needed initially sure, but my albums are listed by year as I want. Even in IOS 10.

I too type the album release year in the "Sort Album" field, unlike you Christopher I only put the year, don't see a need for the name or part of the name.  But when an artist releases two albums in a year I just add a -1 and -2 etc (example 1999-1).

Time consuming but by using the Songs list view and column sorting by the Year field, activating and dragging the Sort Album field next to the Year column the process is made much faster because you can select all the songs of a given year, hit CTRL-I and do a multiple item Sort Album edit/entry.

Now that iTunes has added sorting by year it's not necessary there anymore, but IOS only offers Artist or Album sorting and placing Year in the Sort Album field appears to be working, even in IOS 10 Music which I just updated to today. (Select Sort Songs & Albums "By Title" in Settings > Music)

A related complaint is so many digital albums now come with a re-release or remaster etc Year entry which throws the order off, so I usually go in and edit that back to the original release year.  Fortunately those manual year changes sync across devices.  I also change the Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist to last name first name and that also syncs, but if you download it after changing the year it will overwrite the edited year, but you can change it back after downloading.

I just typed a long answer related to your original question but didn't address it directly.  Agree sorting is not flexible in IOS 10 but if you have iTunes installed in a computer synced to the same Apple music account type(s) as your IOS device you can get there, just takes extra work that wouldn't have to be done if as you say Apple would just provide year as an option.

Thank you for good advice on using only the year in the "sort album" field. I makes the process of filling that field so much faster as you described.

I did this some years ago when iTunes was missing sort by year. It works so well I only noticed iTunes year sorting was back yesterday while looking for a solution for IOS 10 Music.

Man the new update is awful.  Shuffle is moved again (and why was it on by default?), Songs are sorting by artist instead of by song title, cant hide the songs I haven't re-downloaded from the cloud (had to remove from Library...ugh), gigantic gaudy wording/tiles in app.  I'll have to find a new music app if this cant be changed.

Thanks for the tip. Took me a couple hours to change the tags and a couple more to reload my 128g iPod. Whoever made that change to the Music app doesn't have any practical experience using it. Artist's albums by year is an important way to sort them, especially if you have a large library.