Organizing Albums in Chronologic Order: by month?

You could use the Grouping field to put the dates in and sort on that.

Tagging (sorting) and then playing back your albums or singles in chronological order is easy. Some of the fields you can use for this are the Comments, Grouping, or Composer fields. Most people have their Comments and Grouping fields already cluttered-up with enough data to categorize it as a short story, but for your situation to work, the dates have to be entered in the beginning of the field. Therefore, I choose to use the Composer field. Apologies to the composers involved, but if there is a song in my library that's a 4 star or above,
+*I probably already know who wrote it*+, Plus lots of times, the composer field comes tagged with gibberish or a one-hit-wonder unknown composer. As far as my needs go, there is no information in that field that would ever need to be saved, then recalled later in a Smart Playlist, but that's just me.
Starting from scratch, I open my library, select all my songs and right-click them, and in the "Get info/Multiple Item Information" dialog box, click the composer field (which should be empty) then click > OK. Now that all the Composer fields are completely blank, I add info. to the albums/singles I desire. In your case, you would highlight all the tracks in a particular album. Then right-click those songs so you are adding the same data to multiple items. If your album was released on Janurary 1, 2010 you would enter it as 2010-1-1 and so on and so on for each desired album. Then to play them back chronologically, you would click the Composer heading to sort them as oldest album at the top of the playlist window, followed by the next recent one. Another caveat to having the year first is you can do a smart playlist with the criteria: "Composer starts with" (1999, for example) to pull up that year only and play those back chronologically.
With the "-" in the year or any other character seperator, you can also do a smart playlist with the criteria "Composer contains "-". This of course will pull up +any and all+ of the albums/singles you want to play back chronologically and leave any of the actual composer info. for the other albums/songs you want to leave in.
I hope this works out for you.
P.S. If you want to keep the composer info in that field, first use the "Cut" command on the composer's name, put in your "date of release" info.at the beginning of the field, then paste back the composer info. at the end of the Composer field.

podcartuneist wrote:
Tagging (sorting) and then playing back your albums or singles in chronological order is easy. Some of the fields you can use for this are the Comments, Grouping, or Composer fields. Most people have their Comments and Grouping fields already cluttered-up with enough data to categorize it as a short story, but for your situation to work, the dates have to be entered in the beginning of the field. Therefore, I choose to use the Composer field. Apologies to the composers involved, but if there is a song in my library that's a 4 star or above,
+*I probably already know who wrote it*+, Plus lots of times, the composer field comes tagged with gibberish or a one-hit-wonder unknown composer. As far as my needs go, there is no information in that field that would ever need to be saved, then recalled later in a Smart Playlist, but that's just me.
Starting from scratch, I open my library, select all my songs and right-click them, and in the "Get info/Multiple Item Information" dialog box, click the composer field (which should be empty) then click > OK. Now that all the Composer fields are completely blank, I add info. to the albums/singles I desire. In your case, you would highlight all the tracks in a particular album. Then right-click those songs so you are adding the same data to multiple items. If your album was released on Janurary 1, 2010 you would enter it as 2010-1-1 and so on and so on for each desired album. Then to play them back chronologically, you would click the Composer heading to sort them as oldest album at the top of the playlist window, followed by the next recent one. Another caveat to having the year first is you can do a smart playlist with the criteria: "Composer starts with" (1999, for example) to pull up that year only and play those back chronologically.
With the "-" in the year or any other character seperator, you can also do a smart playlist with the criteria "Composer contains "-". This of course will pull up +any and all+ of the albums/singles you want to play back chronologically and leave any of the actual composer info. for the other albums/songs you want to leave in.
I hope this works out for you.
P.S. If you want to keep the composer info in that field, first use the "Cut" command on the composer's name, put in your "date of release" info.at the beginning of the field, then paste back the composer info. at the end of the Composer field.

HAH...I guess I misunderstood your question...good thing for me I re-read it before logging out(insert embarrassed emicon here!). Sorting albums by the month is both original and unusual.
I guess in your case, you would do everything I mentioned above, but denote Janurary 1, 2010 as 1-1-2010, which would play all your January albums first including any albums you have from the 1940's or 50's...actually, not a bad little twist!

Sidenote:
This brings up a good question from me: Is there a way to edit or delete a reply after it's been posted???

iTunes has its own set of features allowing you to sort, so you're stuck with working with those (for example, I'd love to be able to specify only show duplicates from the same album in the view duplicates window, but no -go). There's a lot of work-arounds, as suggested by other posts, but then you have to be willing to put in the effort to make it work. Does music from the ITMS even have full release dates by day and month? If it does, you could use some of Dougscripts to see if you could shuffle and concatenate them into a field such as grouping to do what you want.

ITMS = iTunes Music Store

[Dougscripts|http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scriptcount.php?sortBy=Name&o p=y] - Many itunes scripts

I have been looking for itunes to add this exact feature for YEARS......
Many artists in the '70's were much more productive than current bands and they could easily release 2 albums in one year.

I have yet to see a good way to handle this issue, I'm sure it's annoying many music fans with clean iTunes catalogs. Can't Apple add a check button of some kind in iTunes?

The application MetaX (which can be opened from within iTunes to edit tags) allows you to add the full date (yyyy-mm-dd) into the year field. I haven't tested though if iTunes is able to sorts tracks of the same year by full date.