iphone 4 running iOS4.2 not sorting tv shows correctly

Thanks Nyxo,

works for me fine now - just a bloody pain doing all this cos of yet another Apples poxy updates.
Thanks though for your post.

If you get the applescript from "dougs Applescripts" there is one called "put this in that"

I simply selected all my TV Shows (2400 of them) in itunes, Then ran the apple script from the menu bar in itunes. I selected to From field as "Show" and the to field as "Artist" and let it run.

It took about 20 minutes but it was a one step process.

Thank you NyxoLyno! I've been going out of my mind trying to get to the bottom of this one, wondering why the bulk of the TV shows on my iPod touch suddenly all claimed to be episodes of Doctor Who. For hours I dismissed the possibility that it could have been the iOS4.2 upgrade because the upgraded iPad wasn't showing the same symptoms.

And the actual solution -- using the Artist field as the show's name -- is just so counter-intuitive I don't think I'd have ever figured it out unless it was by sheer trial and error. To be fair all of the stuff I've bought through iTunes does use the Artist field in this way but I never would have thought it that critical.

These are the sorts of threads Mr. Jobs should read when he's trying to judge the reception of a new version of iOS. It's nice that we're all here to help each other out but with mature products like iTunes and the various iDevices we should not have to resort to mining metadata and writing custom scripts just to get things working the way they were working prior to the upgrade.

"It just works." But not necessarily the way it did before 🙂

How can we pressure Apple to fix this? I don't have the knowledge or patience to edit metadata, code etc.

Thanks for the help on this, much appreciated.

A minor bug I know, but why does EVERY Apple update have bugs? I bought my 3G a couple of years ago, the first and only Apple product I own. It will probably be my last Apple product too. "It just works..." yeah, right.

I can't comment on the bugs issue otehr than to say that its not possible for a few hundred testers to replicate the way millions of users have their system set up.

For me the change would have no practical impact.

I always rename my TV episodes to remove every bit of data except the show name and the number goes in the title itself e.g. "101 - Pilot".

Any field changes would be done with the above mentioned script facility which ahs always been excellent.

That is very true, but this is a very fundamental problem. I can understand some obscure bug creeping in, but this is not obscure. It a fundamental shift in how TV shows are dealt with in the iPod app. There are no excuses for this.

Every version of iOS seems to break something unfortunately. Apple's testing processes are clearly in need of major revision.

For what it's worth I've fixed the sorting of my TV shows now through a combination of putting the series title into the artist field, and the episode number into the ID field. Crazy but as Apple seem incapable of releasing properly tested software, it seems we must keep jumping through hoops to make things work.

I have the same problem!

What about the old saying for computer users: Never change a running system! ...
Some updates are necessary, but I find it odd that they allways mess around with previosly fully functional procedures in the programming. I am studying computer science and even though I do not know this scource code, I do not unterstand why the sorting does not work anymore. They may have included some new featured, but how on Earth did they mess around with the sorting ... or on a related topic the playing of videos while the screen is off ... For that discussion look here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2658709&tstart=0

Anyway ... Allways a few glitches in every update ... I was really looking forward to iOS 4.2, especially wanted the in-website-search. But next time I'll wait a few weeks before updating. Because if these bugs ever get fixed at all, it will take weeks before Apple releases the update. Bottom line: very disappointing ... again! 😟

Maybe they are trying to move toward having just one section that covers multiple media types. I never understood why they would have both a video and info section for tv shows where some of the tags go in one section while other tags go in another. In my opinion, everything should all go in info. They should probably look at renaming the field names though. For instance, track can be changed to episode/track or something like that. But it makes sense that "track" is basically the same relation as a song in a music album as "episode" is to a season in a TV show.

newagemac wrote:
For instance, track can be changed to episode/track or something like that. But it makes sense that "track" is basically the same relation as a song in a music album as "episode" is to a season in a TV show.

I disagree. episode is the album number, track is the chapter in the episode (provided it has chapters like filmsusually have)

If they are changing the way fields are used, then why does iTunes (released just before iOS) still use the old way? ITunes should also then upgrade tags on existing media.

It's either bug, or a typical Apple shot across the bows at those who are getting their media from sources other than the cash cow that is iTMS.

NyxoLyno wrote:
iOS 4.2 does NOT read the "TV Show" tag. It reads the "Artist" tag for the show title.

If you put the name of the TV show in the "Artist" field, it will sort them correctly.

Are you sure about your first point? My iPhone 4 with 4.2.1 uses the "TV Show" Tag, not the "Artist" Tag. The only problem that seems to be in 4.2.1 is that the "Artist" tag cannot be empty, otherwise the TV shows are rendered unpredictable (usually they show up in an "Unknown" show, ot as part of another show).

I usually put the Director in the "Artist" tag, and all is fine on my iPhone now.

BTW-

After gnashing my teeth for a few days before discovering this thread, I realized that it only happens on files I have manually tagged. (MetaX)

Purchased files from iTunes or files I 'auto' tagged using Atomic Parsley have the Artist, Album Artist, Artist and Track fields populated already.

I found it curious that Atomic Parsley already did this.

I tried the above mentioned fix - whilst it does seem to at least arrange my shows in their own group, I still get episodes as 0.

Odder still, some episodes are numbered correctly on my iPod, whilst most aren't! I don't get it.

Also, even though all my TV series artist names and series name are correctly filled out it still bundles one of my TV shows under "Unknown".

It also takes a while for my iPod to just load up episode lists. The previous iOS version never took this long.

This is really getting on my nerves.