Coverflow sort order on iPod

I cannot work out why:
1 - coverflow displays in a different order to Albums on the iPod
2 - and in a different order in Coverflow on the PC to Coverflow on the iPod.
Any suggestions? Is it possible to specify the sort field in coverflow?

Sony Vaio, Windows XP Pro, SP2, iPod Classic 160, Buffalo Link Station Live

Posted on Mar 26, 2008 2:35 PM

Reply
3 replies

Mar 26, 2008 5:08 PM in response to mcphobe

The iPod appears to groups albums by looking at the Artist field rather than Album Artist. As I recall the first couple of revisions of iTunes 7 did this as well but it got fixed pretty quickly. Nothing has so far changed with the iPod Classic in this respect. It causes problems in Cover Flow and when selecting albums from the Artist menu. In general I've noticed that for Cover Flow if you only have one album by an artist then tracks on the album that feature guests may not cause multiple covers provided the tag lists the principal artist before the guests. If you have two or more albums & guests are involved then multiple covers for the same album seems inevitable. Workarounds are moving the guest info. into the track title or changing the Sort Artist to Album Artist when there are guests on a track. I prefer this second method even though it can create duplicate listings in the artist menu as a side effect - hopefully it will be easier to undo should they get around to fixing the firmware to group on album artist.

The other Cover Flow gotcha is that all tracks with the same album title get returned (irespective of artist) when you select an album with a given title - this is most obvious with Greatest Hits albums where you will see all the tracks from all the Greatest Hits albums listed together when you select any one of them. Workarounds are to rename affected albums in some fashion, e.g. *Album - Album Artist* , change the Sort Album value for each one or add differing numbers of trailing spaces to different albums

tt2

Mar 30, 2008 11:53 AM in response to Katrina S.

iPod Classic 160

Having taken a little time today to make careful observations I can report that:

Coverflow on the iPod Classic sorts the albums twice! Firstly by album name and then by artist (or the second line of the album title in Coverflow) and one sort just flows into the other. Very confusing until you spot it and then quite useful! Typical of the Apple "if you need to ask you're too stupid to understand so just leave it to us" philosophy!

Coverflow in iTunes sorts only by album name. I have not entered anything yet into the "sort fields" as the apple helpfiles do not give any indication as to how these work in relation to each other.

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Coverflow sort order on iPod

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