itunes media library sorting function - big fail?

Whenever you sort on a column you can click on the small black triangle to reverse the order of the sort. iTunes does not generally allow for a multi-valued sort, so clicking on Year for example won't always keep tracks from the same album togther. Clicking on the Album heading repeatedly cycles it between Album, *Album by Artist* (read as Album by Album Artist) and *Album by Year* (read as Album by Album Artist by Year). Of these I find *Album by Artist* the most useful order and only use others when I'm trying to compare things that would otherwise not appear together.

Compilations can be linked using the *Part of a Compilation* flag. Also useful is the *Album Artist* field. For more on this see my previous post on Grouping Tracks Into Albums.

tt2

+"Ok, thx for the answer. I just tried to sort by "album by year", but the sorting function works not correct in my media library... I would say that there is no sorting by year..."+

Nothing looks wrong in your screen shot. You show two albums by Cassius, and they are sorted so that all the tracks from the 1999 album appear first, since they have a "jahr" of 1999, and then the tracks from "Au Reve", which have a "jahr" of 2002. That is how album by year works.

It is still a riddle for me why it's not possible to sort by the column year, while the album tracks gonna stick together in the right way 1, 2, 3... and not 12, 11, 10...

It is sorted in descending (highest to lowest) order.
You need to click the triangle in the Year (Jahr) column header to sort ascending (lowest to highest).
This will sort the earliest year at top and the album tracks should be in track # order.

As I said earlier iTunes doesn't really do multi-level sorts, or rarther it doesn't give us users any control over them. Looking again at the Album by Year view it's actually ordering on quite a few values. In pseudo SQL it's something like this:

SELECT * FROM Tracks ORDER BY Sort Album Artist,Year (Of 1st Track),Album,Disc #(Empties Last),Track #(Empties Last)

Where there is no Sort Album Artist value it is infered from Album Artist, Sort Artist or Artist. Where there is no Sort Album it is infered from Album. Using this ordering a new cover is created in coverflow whenever the value of Album changes. Looking closly at sorting on the Year column it seems to be:

SELECT * FROM Tracks ORDER BY Year (Empties First),Sort Artist,Sort Album,Disc #(Empties First),Track #(Empties First)

I probably still haven't teased out all of the details, but if you apply the fix I suggest here for featured artists so that, for non-compilations, Artist = Album Artist for all tracks of an album then both the views above will always list the tracks in track order provided you use an ascending sort.

EDIT: It is also not plausible for me that the sorting function "album by year" should work like that - so that it sorts by artist first and then by albums by year. I want to sort by year, independent from artist.

Plausible or not, that's the way it has been programmed.

tt2

Apple - this makes no sense.

iTunes 9, View as Grid, Sort by Year, Newest First.

When I play an album, the tracks are listed in reverse order. It plays Track 1, but doesn't play any further, since it's reverse sorting, Track 1 is the last in the list. SUPER annoying.

I fail to see the logical connection between wanting to see newest albums first, and reversing the track order of the songs on an album. DUMB.

Not only that, but even when I resort the track order in an album to normal, iTunes often still plays the tracks in reverse order, going UP the playlist.

???