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Sorting Songs in Catalina Music app

In the new Music app on Catalina: Can I open a top window with column for Genre, Artist, and Album? Song view now gives me a list of 25,000 songs organized alphabetically. I need a view that lets me browse my library more quickly.

Posted on Oct 13, 2019 11:58 AM

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Posted on Oct 20, 2019 3:53 PM

This is a poor and unfortunate response by Apple. The removal of the Column Browser is a great loss in the update. Viewing and navigating songs by album or artist was so much easier with the Column Browser. My use of Apple Music will be greatly diminished without the 3-columm browser display. I'm very disappointed in Apple's decision to remove it, especially since so many users desire it.

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Oct 20, 2019 3:53 PM in response to chris_g1

This is a poor and unfortunate response by Apple. The removal of the Column Browser is a great loss in the update. Viewing and navigating songs by album or artist was so much easier with the Column Browser. My use of Apple Music will be greatly diminished without the 3-columm browser display. I'm very disappointed in Apple's decision to remove it, especially since so many users desire it.

Oct 18, 2019 11:37 AM in response to Scott Bukatman

Hello Scott,



Thanks for that info and for choosing the Apple Support Communities. If I understand correctly, you would like to customize the Music app window when looking at songs to be able to sort in a way that works better for you. To do this, when you click Songs from the Library in the left sidebar, then press Command-J you will be able to select the View Options for Songs. Pick the options that would help with the sorting you need. Then you can drag the Genre, Artist, Songs and other options left or right at the top to the positions you prefer them at. You can also hover your mouse next to the word Library in the sidebar to get an edit option and adjust what is shown in the sidebar.



Keyboard shortcuts in Music on Mac



Cheers!

Oct 18, 2019 12:35 PM in response to chris_g1

Not the same thing at all. Column Browser in iTunes gave me a 3-column layout, which I had as: Genre, Artist, Album. Then songs matching that category appeared below. Songs in Apple Music app is just one huge list -- yes, I can arrange that list, but it's still one gigantic list. I have 25,000 songs in my library. One list isn't going to cut it.


Column Browser made browsing a huge library very easy and efficient.

Nov 6, 2019 10:57 AM in response to chris_g1

Chrig_g1 -- your answer about sorting is incomplete. Here's my problem. If I sort by Genre -- then some of the other fields are not sorted. So I have Genre as the primary sort but the tracks column is out of order. I have the album songs grouped but the song order is wrong because tracks is no longer sorted. I have tried sorting on tracks, then on genre in the hope that the track order would not be messed up when genre is sorted, but this doesn't help. This problem is called secondary sort. Is there anyway to sort genre, then album within genre, than disc within album, the track within disc?


I can not forgive Apple for eliminating column browser view. If I had know before upgrading to Catalina I absolutely would not have upgraded. But given there is no column browser we should at least have an intelligent sort capability in the song list.

Sorting Songs in Catalina Music app

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