iPod/Music App in iOS5 not sorting artist list alphabetically

It's fixed! All my artists were in order because I had done a restore and haden't added any music in the past couple of months. I recently upgraded to iTunes 11, added music, synced and all is good with the world. Wow. Finally. Thank you Apple. Now I don't hate my iPhone as much anymore. It just works. Yay.

llamagoosc: I can confirm. Moving to iTunes 11 fixed this problem for me, can't tell you how relieved I am... Have had the issue for over a year when I was on a 3GS. Currently on a 4S with iOS 5.1.1, but it's the move to iTunes 11 that did it. Glad they finally fixed it...

The best fix is to go into iTunes, highlight every single track, right click 'get info', tick the 'composer' box and save it as an empty space. This removes all the composer data for all of your individual tracks. Sync with your iPhone and it'll sort all your music in order, I promise.

I had a similar problem. In my case Led Zepellin I , II and III showed up in C . Right click on that particular album a nd click 'Get Info ' and go to Sorting tab and makesure every field is empty . Sync once again and everything will be sorted .

@Nayan: I think that's an intentional feature of the sorting tag. What we were experiencing here had little to do with sort information. You would have everything fine, then add a song to your itunes library and sync with the phone. Suddenly all kinds of fields were alphabetized out of whack, not just the song you added.

@Nayan @ondrei: I believe you are missing something and want to write this reply so that others aren't confused. This thread exists because there was an issue that affected many of us even if all settings were perfect and set up so that nothing would throw the artists out of order. Even with the "composer", "artist album", and other fields erased, our artists were still out of order. This was caused by something on Apple's side that was outside of our control. As you can see, users pretty much tried everything they could think of for ~1.5 years, however the issue was only fixed by installing and syncing with iTunes 11.

I am having the same problem with a new 4s on 6.0.1 on iTunes 11.1. I have tried everything this and many other threads have suggested to no avail. I must however mention that my previous 3 iPhone 4 models all running 5.1.1 had no problem in this area, which leads me to believe in a software malfunction in iOS 6. Would love a fix to this, Apple you need to wake the **** up before you lose loyal customers. Peace.

iPhoneCollector wrote:

I am having the same problem with a new 4s on 6.0.1 on iTunes 11.1. I have tried everything this and many other threads have suggested to no avail. I must however mention that my previous 3 iPhone 4 models all running 5.1.1 had no problem in this area, which leads me to believe in a software malfunction in iOS 6. Would love a fix to this, Apple you need to wake the **** up before you lose loyal customers. Peace.

This thread was created in 2011; ios6 did not exist back then so obviously it is not ios6 related.

Have you followed instructions that I said in my earlier post?

Yay!!

Almost 50% of my songs, artists and albums were located under 123 instead of their letter, I followed the advice of swithching language, in my case between English and Thai, but thats mainly because I figured that maybe some of the Thai songs were at fault, back to English and guess what?

It worked!!

So thanks to all who helped with this issue.

Now if only I could get my iPhone 4 to find wifi sources as well as my collegues Galaxy!!

Cheers

Stu

Alright guys, i have just solved this issue by myself yesterday. I'm going to write it down step by step;

1- Download Mp3tag. (I don't know if it's available in Mac. If not, try another ID3 tag editor software.)

2- Drag all of the songs into the mp3tag. Select all, right click and select "extended tags"

3- Remove the fields "albumartistsort","artistsort","albumsort","composersort","titlesort".

4- Save. (it should be a prompt like "tags saved")

5- Add the songs to itunes library and sync with your iDevice.

That should solve your problem.Let me know if it worked or not.

This is not an issue with sorting tags (that is an intentional feature of iTunes). When I had this error, things were ending up in a different order at different times, even with all sorting tags cleared.

It appears that it was some issue with the itunes library database file and how it was transfered to iOS 5 (maybe old libraries? mine was started in itunes 4) that is only corrected by upgrading to version 11.

Mine is solved by doing those things, the cause of the problem can be differ, but it is worth to try my solution in order to notice what is the backpart of problem.

It worked for you this one time when you synced, but there's no guarantee it won't break again.

Furthermore, editing tags outside of itunes can be problematic for itunes to see the changes w/o readding the whole library again. You might as well simply edit some irrelevant tags and then delete them again. However, it's still faster to just nuke index from your ios device and resync rather than let itunes or mp3tag or whatever to plow through all of your tracks.

WAIT WAIT!!! I had the same problem dont restore just turn it off and turn it back on and it should fix it!!

Do you really think that in 2 years since this problem have been around, with 150 replies and 33000 reads that nobody else tried rebooting their phones?😕