Sorting by Date Added, but I how can I have songs sorted by track number?

Hi Peter. You'll get slack for typos if your contibution to the thread is at least pertinent. If you had read the thread fully you would understand that while it is possible to get any order you want by sorting manually, that is also tedious, indeed nigh on impossible as soon as meaningful numbers of tracks are involved.

What is actually desired is a way to ensure that when any given playlist is sorted on the Date Added column, that the tracks from any and all albums are grouped togther and in the correct track order. Since iTunes can't manage this natively I wrote a script some time ago to remove and reimport tracks in a way that would make sure that the desired sort order could be achieved. A recent update to iTunes has affected the behaviour of the script which meant it wasn't functioning properly. Hopefully my latest build provides a workaround for those who have want of it.

tt2

Nice (and speedy!) work @TuringTest2!

Giving it a shot now ...

Seems to work great.

My last questions are.. each song takes 1 second. Did it take that long before? Is that because of the manual waiting until it's the next second to import? Any way around that (faking the import times for instance?)

Thanks for your continued and speedy help!

Yes, it has always waited at least one second between imports. This is necessary because of the way iTunes orders items that have the same apparent import time.

I wouldn't know how to intercept iTunes requests to know the time and randomly resetting the system clock, even if only to make seconds pass more quickly, might have unintended consequences.

tt2

turingtest2 wrote:

Hi Mick...

Sadly iTunes isn't built the way you want it right now. A workaround is to ensure you add your new imports, one track at a time, in reverse track order, at least one second apart (probably not a problem if you're doing it by hand, but it makes a difference). If that sounds like a drag I've written a Windows vbScript for automating the process called SortDateAdded and rather foolishly suggested in another thread the other day that it ought not to be too hard to migrate my script into AppleScript. I've since had a look at an online AppleScript primer which leads me to think the job is little harder than I first thought but I have organised some access to a Mac for testing so I will try to give it a go over the next week or so.

tt2

I never did get around to this at the time, but by chance I notice that Doug Adams has just released add-file-in-reverse-sort-by-date-added to his collection of AppleScripts for iTunes, which does much the same thing.

tt2