iTunes 10.2.2 displaying tracks out of order

Easy Fix.

Above the Song Column will be the title, NAME with a checkmark to the left of it.

Although it looks blank, click "left" of the check mark and the character, ^ , will appear.

If ^ is showing, your songs will be displayed in numerical order.

If this space is blank, your songs will appear in alphabetical order.

Hope that helps!

The left most column you refer to in a playlist is called the Play Order. The chevron at the top of it means the tracks are sorted on that column. The tracks below can be manually reordered. That they happen to be in numerical order for you is an accident of the order in which you added them to the list. Clicking the headings of other columns will sort on their values instead. Clicking the heading of the Album column cycles between Album, Album by Artist, and Album by Artist/Year. Album by Artist is the most common setting. Clicking the chevron reverses the sort order, but iTunes may play tracks out of sequence when a reverse order is chosen so I don't recommend leaving it set that way. You can copy the currently displayed order to the play order by right-clicking on the playlist name in the sidebar. The Play Order is the order copied to any device, not necessarily the current order shown in iTunes.

tt2

Ok, I have a simple work around to this stupidity that itunes should've made automatic...

Basically, the easiest way is for each song in the album you individually do the following:

1) Remove the album title from the song

2) Press enter

3) Find the song now again and retype the exact album you just removed it from

4) Now press enter again

5) Now that it is re-added to the album it will be in order of track number

This is intuitive and very basic but its the only way that works. This is what I do.

Sort by Album, Album by Artist or Artist.

OK i was having the same problem but THINK i solved it...

Firstly, get into the "Album View" view.

From here there is an option which i couldn't find anywhere else...

Up the top there are 2 Album tabs. The one on the right is the standard one, but the one of the left has a drop down option when you click on it. Check the "sort" option "Album by Title"

That put the songs into the correct order for me - even once i changed my view back to my preferred "as List" view (so long as the ALBUM tab was checked)

Hope that helps!

You see this situation if you have a album with mixed artists on it. Right click on the first track of the album and select Get Info. Select the info tab. Make sure the "Album Artist" field is blank. Repeat for all tracks in the album.

Sometimes if you get albums from...heh heh..."wherever", the person who does the tags messes up and puts the information of the Artist of the SONG into the Album Artist field. If it is a mixed artist album, this sorts the album individually instead of a whole album. You may want to look at the SORT fields, also. These are located under the SORT tab.

Hope this helps.

Thank you....this really worked

niteworkr wrote:

You see this situation if you have a album with mixed artists on it. Right click on the first track of the album and select Get Info. Select the info tab. Make sure the "Album Artist" field is blank. Repeat for all tracks in the album.

If it is album with mixed artists, you don't want Album Artist field to be blank. You want eh Album Artist in that filed. The Album Artist is the artist who's album it is. The songs may have guest artists.

Album Artist is irrelevant to this bug and yes, even though there is a fix I'm calling it a bug.

I had several albums out of order. One of them seemed quite obvious: the two tracks that were out of order had composers listed, while the rest of the composer fields were blank.

Using cut and paste to make sure the values were identical, I selected all the songs and went to view info. I filled in Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist, and Sort Album Artist with the same value (the name of the band). I also used cut and paste to make sure that Album and Sort Album were both identical (the name of the album). I set the year and the genre in case one of those things was messing up the sort order.

After this, the order of the tracks was 5, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12.

So I did the same thing again and deleted the values in the Composer field.

After this, the order of the tracks was 5, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12.

So I did the same thing again and added the value that had previously in the Composer field, but to all the songs.

After this, the order of the tracks was 5, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12.

I shut down iTunes, rebooted the computer and opened iTunes again, then went to look at that album.

After this, the order of the tracks was 5, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12.

So I sorted on "Album by title" (which had previously been "Album by artist and year") as sacred_june suggested, then went back to sort on "Album by artist and year."

Now the order of the tracks is correct.

It's nice that there's a workaround, but don't for a second pretend that there isn't something broken in iTunes's sort logic.

All that said, yes, you described the use of the Album Artist field correctly.

There may be a "fix" but you gotta be kidding me. That's going to take major time, something I don't have. I want my tracks to download IN ORDER THE FIRST TIME. I sent feedback to Apple about it but in the meantime I'm stuck with several albums downloaded out of order, including what someone said earlier was his/her problem of albums being split. This just happened to me about 3 hours ago. Again.

Erm, could you explain why you haven't updated iTunes yet?

Sort by Album

Just did it. Now at least I can see the correct order these songs are supposed to be in. I didn't mention that my problem is with compilation albums, or albums with different artists; the same issue someone else had. The one in question yesterday was the "Quartet" soundtrack from the movie. What a schmozzle. I sorted by album first....of course that didn't work. I'm not a techie -- I like my things to work out of the box and having to go in to each individual piece, grab info, add and delete stuff just to get the **** stuff in order....really? How hard can it be to design software to download an album in the order it shows on the CD?

OK egg on face. Re-sorted songs...by album as suggested. And we're OK.

Only prob now is I prefer to listen to songs in order of download, not necessarily by album, and when I do that (even if I downloaded the whole album at the same time like I did this one) we're back to the same old schmozzle.

And while I'm ranting, could you smarter folks explain why in Albums looking for this particular soundtrack (Quartet) I go straight from Pussycat Dolls to Quarteto Em Cy. "Quartet" is under "various artists," not even "soundtracks." Sigh.

Thanks.