Multiple Column Sorting in iTunes

It can't done... Certain column orderings such as Album by Artist do in fact sub-sort on a number of different fields but we, as users, have no control over how this works.

FWIW the Sort Show field is intended to be a modifier for the Show field, itself analogus to Album, and used to group TV Shows.

tt2

Here is what I would like to end up with - Artist; Sort Show (where I have stored the release date); Album; Disk Number; Track Number. Seeing my albums in chronological order is the way I always sorted physical albums, I would like to store my virtual ones the same way.

Dave, If you are in List view, and you click the "Album" header a few times, one of the choices will be "Album by Artist/Year."

Assuming you are using Sort Show for the year, I believe that using "Album by Artist/Year" is very close to what you want (or at least as close as you are going to get with iTunes).

davehyzy wrote:

Thank you SO much ed2345! This will give me what I was looking for (with a slight glitch in Year for two records released in the same year). This is a vast improvement over what I had before.

Dave,

Glad it helped. Now if those artists would just limit themselves to one album per year..... 😝

Enjoy the music!

Ed

You can also turn on SORTING in VIEW > COLUMN BROWSER,

turn on all the views,

then you can highlight all the tracks you want in a group, IE, by label, or five starts or whatever you like,

then select that and they will be easier to sort.

Getting to the heart of the original post/question, why isn't there a way to sort by multiple columns? After all, iTunes is essentially a database, so why can't it be handled like one?

Specifically, what I want to do is check the checkboxes of several albums in their entirety, by different artists, then play those checked songs based upon their track number. So I would hear "Artist A, Track 1" followed by "Artist B, Track 1," then "Artist A, Track 2," followed by "Artist B, Track 2," and so on.

Is there a way to do this without manually building a playlist, which is extremely cumbersome?

It is a database internally, and there are some multivalued sorts, but as users we don't get to specify custom sort orders. Album by Artist is more properly Album by Album Artist and in pseudo-SQL it would go something like this.

SELECT * FROM Selection ORDER BY SortAlbumArtist, SortAlbum, Disc# , Track#

Where there is no SortAlbumArtist it is inferred from the first non-empty value of AlbumArtist, SortArtist or Artist.

Where there is no SortAlbum it is inferred from Album.

The Disc# & Track# sorts place empties last.

Presumably the designers think they've included useful options and adding nested sorting features would be too complicated, but you can make suggestions via iTunes Feedback.

tt2

Well, I don't know what pseudo-SQL is, nor do I have the desire or the time to learn, so I don't know if the above comment is an answer to my question or not. In the days of CD-based music, what I want to do would be a simple and intuitive matter of programming. In iTunes, it's a cumbersome process of building a playlist, which still may or may not play the way intended. Why has such a simple capability been lost with the advent of digital music? For crying out loud, people, it's COMPUTERS! They should be able to do any form of data/file manipulation imaginable, within reason. I could sort the songs this way in frikkin' MS Word! Why can't I sort them this way in the almighty Apple's flagship music program?

While we're on the subject, here's a question that should be easy to answer (but won't be): in iTunes, how do you play two or more albums, not by the same artist, back-to-back?

Start first album playing. For second album click small tool with three dots in a circle and select Add to Up Next.

tt2

"Start first album playing" Would you care to elaborate upon that step? Here's what happens:

I click on the iTunes icon

I see a list of my songs

I click on a song

It starts playing

It gets to the end

It stops. The next song doesn't play.

So I think, "Oh, I need to play an album, so I'll go to the Album view." Sooooo....

I go to Album view

I click on an album

On the lower half of the screen, the album's songs come into view. At the top of those is the album title, followed by a "Play" triangle.

I click on the "Play" triangle.

Nothing happens. No song plays.

Just how difficult and counterintuitive can the Apple programmers make things? Why must one be a member of "the priesthood" to perform a simple task like playing an album, or playing more than one album, or playing a mix of songs in a preferred order? These capabilities have existed since the first 78 r.p.m. record was cut. Why has Apple made them so obscure?

If one song doesn't play after another, or the album won't play from the play button in the albums view, then I would suspect that all tracks have become unchecked. In the Songs view you can see the check boxes. In the Albums view unchecked songs are listed in a feint type. When using the Songs or other list views view you can ctrl-click any checkbox to toggle the state of all items in the current view, or you can make a selection, then use the right-click context menu. Or you can used Edit > Preferences > General > Show list checkboxes > Off to avoid the whole problem.

FWIW I'm a fellow user. I cannot tell you why things are the way they are, but at a guess it suffers from being designed by a committee.

tt2

So in other words, if I want to play an album, I have to first make sure every song on that album is checked? And if I want to play more than one album, back-to-back, I would have to make sure that NO other songs are checked besides the songs on the albums I want to hear?

Gosh, if only we had some sort of "data processing" device that could figure out that when I click on a "Play" button, I want something to PLAY! And perhaps when the "Play" button is right next to the title of an album, maybe I want to PLAY the whole album! Darn, can't someone invent a device that will COMPUTE these possibilities?

FFS, Apple, learn how people use things out here in the real world!

Although there is no guidance to the effect, as a rule all of your media should be checked except for the occasional tracks that you don't want played unintentionally. It is perhaps unfortunate that the checked/unchecked status can also be used to control what syncs to any devices so that people may be tempted to use the feature for that purpose when it isn't the best method of control. For myself my unchecked tracks are mainly bonus interview tracks and the mono versions where I have albums that feature both mono & stereo mixes of the same tracks. All the rest of my tracks are checked, so things work as I expect and intend.

Perhaps MediaMonkey would suit you better?

tt2

Excel uses a "non-destuctive" sort algorithm. It only moves rows that must be moved to achieve the requested sort. Thus, if you first sort by Artist (in a spreadsheet) and THEN sort by genre, you automatically get rows sorted by Artist WITHIN Genre. You can do this with as many successive columns as you like for a multi-dimensional sort; and it's all "for free".

I have submitted a feedback to Apple to use this algorithm in tabular iTunes song listings. (I'm sure I'm not the first to do so.)