songs list sorting

iTunes has had this feature for all of the 15 or so years that I have been using it, and it is considered the conventional way to sort music. There is a mechanism to supply your own sort criteria should you choose. Either you feel strongly enough about it to put in the effort required to have things the way that you want them, or you don't. Judging from my own 60,000 track library and using quickly constructed smart playlists to identify artists, album artists, and albums that have leading articles you might have around 25% of your library that would need editing if you want it to be consistent. If it were just track titles then around 5% of mine begin with an article. Doug's Scripts has a solution for Mac users, I've written one called UnAutoSort for Windows users. In each case thousands of tracks can be modified in a few minutes. Should you choose such an approach backup your library first, and test the process on a small number of tracks to familiarise yourself with the behaviour before applying in bulk. Some edits are not easily reversible.

tt2

If, for example, you want to have The Beatles sorted under T rather than B then you need to manually enter The Beatles as the sort artist and sort album artist. You could potentially use this script https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxthistagthattag to mechanise the propcess of copying the primary value to the sort value for selected tracks.

tt2

Gaetanosavoca,

There is not a way to modify the sort rules. However, for individual tracks, you can enter a value for "sort as" on the Sorting tab of Get Info, which will override the rules.

Here is some useless but (possibly) interesting information: In the ancient days of iTunes the ignoring of articles was controlled by a "SortPrefixes" file that was pre-popped according to language: a, an, the in English; le, la, les in French, etc. Here is an old post on the topic: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2302477?answerId=10916630022#10916630022

You could edit it if you wanted to change the behavior, but that could lead to odd behavior, e.g. if you wanted Die Walküre under W, you were going to get Die From a Broken Heart under F.

Use of the Sort fields gives much better control. Downside is it doesn't lend itself so well to mass changes, but hey, that is where scripting comes in.