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Albums show songs in reverse order, play songs in reverse order

Hi,

I've experienced the most ridiculous bug in iTunes for several years now which I figured would eventually get fixed but with the release of iTunes 10, it is still there! Clearly this needs to be bought to someone's attention.

In short, my albums in iTunes play backwards. Thats right, they play *in REVERSE order*.

When I double-click an Album to jump into it, the Album is sorted by reverse order by default. I can click the first column to sort it by normal order (which works) but if i double-click the first track in the list to begin playing, that track plays but then playback stops after the track has finished. If I hit the Next Track button during playback of that song, playback finishes. If I hit "Previous Track", it jumps to Track #2! If I hit Next Track while on Song #2, it jumps back to track #1. Basically Next Track = Previous Track and vice versa. This includes the normal play order too so if I double-click track #5 to start playing, iTunes will play back to track #1 and then finish!

Some albums in my collection are OK, some are broken. I've tried so many different things to fix it including deleting / recreating my library but so far to no avail.

Does anyone else experience this problem?

FWIW, these are just regular .mp3 files with the usual meta-data (tracks, names, artists, disc numbers etc).

Any suggestions / help would be most appreciated!

MacBook Pro 15" (Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.4), iTunes 10

Posted on Sep 6, 2010 8:10 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Mar 22, 2017 11:53 AM

This post is the top one that shows up on a Google search, so I wanted to answer this 7-year old question. As far as I can tell, iTunes 12.6 FIXES this issue! You can sort your artists descending again!

27 replies

Sep 6, 2010 8:30 PM in response to EpaL

The little arrow/triangle on the sort window toggles. Sounds like you need to click it to sort things back the other way.


EDIT: Well, I don't think your entire post was showing in my window before I posted (or you may have edited and amended it?). Anyway...not sure of the complete problem, but have you looked at combinations of the toggle issue, repeat, shuffle or skip when shuffling being enabled? I've never heard of anything like this in iTunes, and I feel that it has something to do with how you're sorting or how your settings are selected.

Message was edited by: Diane Wordsmith

Sep 7, 2010 6:47 AM in response to EpaL

Subscribing.

I have had this same problem since iTunes 8! Whenever I play albums from the grid view, iTunes both displays and plays the songs in reverse order, very annoying. Even after I change the play order, when ever the song is skipped or done, it goes in reverse and if it's the first track, it just stops.

Sep 7, 2010 9:59 AM in response to Manuel C. Studer

Gooosh!!! I got it!!!!

While in "Grid view" (not in a single album, you need to see the screen with all the albums you've got), do the following:

1. go to "View" in the main menu bar
2. choose "Sort albums" with opening sub menu
3. choose "ascending" from the sub menu

You should see all of your albums sorted by the rating you gave them, having the unrated at the top, followed by the albums with one star (if you even have such thing 😉 and at the bottom you have your 5-star albums, right?

That fixed my problem!!! All albums are now playing in the right order.

Sep 7, 2010 4:41 PM in response to Manuel C. Studer

Wow Manuel, I think you've done it!!! Well done!

Changing the Album Sort Order from Descending to Ascending in Grid View fixes the problem!

Thing is, I like my Albums reverse sorted and grouped by Year. Why does this have any bearing at all on the play order of the songs in those albums??

Clearly this is a bug (and a rather ridiculous one at that) - I'll throw it at bugreport.apple.com and hope it sticks.

Thanks again for your clever insight Manuel!

Sep 17, 2010 1:24 AM in response to themock

Manuel's solution didn't work for me but I think I have found my own way to solve it.

Before creating a playlist from imported tracks click the date/time column heading in the list of music so as to reverse the order and put the newest tracks at the bottom of the list. Access the tracks from there and create the playlist. They will then play in the correct order.

Mar 3, 2011 6:35 AM in response to Al_2212

This is so freaking lame. I have seen posts on the net from 2006 where people have the same issue.

Of course it is natural to want to see the latest albums in a collection (I have over 100Gb of music(

Of course when I want to open and play my recent album, i want to listen to the track sequentially

This is marked as answered but for me this is a very strange and wierd piece of very un-Apple-ish design

FIX IT User uploaded file

Oct 14, 2011 6:12 PM in response to EpaL

Haha... so glad I came across this post. I just upgraded to iTunes 10.5, noticed this issue for the first time. I think because I sorted my albums by date in descending order. Everytime I went to play an album, even when I changed the sort, it would play the first song and stop. RIDICULOUS!!!!


So glad this fix worked. Thanks!


Charlie

Albums show songs in reverse order, play songs in reverse order

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