How do I sort my music by composer in the new iTunes 11?

Thanks, that helped quite a bit. Eddieb

I've just started using iTunes 11 for the first time and the very first thing I've been looking for is a sort by Composers, but apart from the list view sort this seems to be missing.

This is extremely dissappointing.

I am now going to look for alternative programs for organising music.

I searched for alternatives but it's difficult to find anything better than iTunes 10 so the best thing to do is downgrade to iTunes 10. Also, complain through the Apple feedback pages. Spread the word ... - Jos

mkalow wrote:

How do I sort my music by composer in the new iTunes 11?

Mkalow, I am using iTunes 11.0.1, and as far as I can tell, sort by composer works the same as it always did.

Make sure you are in "Songs" view, and make sure that Composer is a visible column (use View > View Options if it is not). Then click on the top of the Composer column.

Does this work on your machine?

You can sort by composer in Song view, however this is a such a poor thing compared with the older iTunes because with that you could have the album covers showing.

If you have many recordings it is much easier to find what you wish with the album covers on the left for each album.

Really for someone with a reasonable amount of classical music albums I have to say that this new iTunes really is terrible.

I have left feedback for Apple about this.

It is clear that classical music listeners were completely off the radar when they made the design changes to iTunes 11. I know that classical music listeners are a minority of iTunes users, but I suspect they are not a tiny minority, I think they are a significant enough number for Apple to consider in its design.

I have now got a system that is working for me. I got the idea from this blog article but I have modified it.

For the title of each "Album" I start with the surname of the composer followed by a colon and space then the name of the "Album".

For example:

Brahms: Violin Sonatas

Debussy: Préludes

Mendelssohn: Complete Works for Cello & Pianoforte

In fact this is quite commonly used as an unofficial way of naming classical CDs so already many will be in this format. All I have done is change those that are not like this already.

Of course sometimes the surname is used for more that one composer so here I put the initial or initials after the surname.

Strauss, R: 4 Last Songs, Orchestral Songs

If I had something by Johan S. Strauss I would start the album title with "Strauss, JS: "

Remember that you can use the iTunes Info window for all the tracks in an "Album" at once so renaming the albums is easy. Just select all the tracks and open the Info window.

With this arrangement I find the most useful view is to go to Genres and then select "Classical". Now you will see all your classical CDs with cover art and as the sort is by album title, now it will be by composer effectively.

So, with this you get one workable view. If the "Albums" view had been sortable by Album title then that would have been workable as well, but from what I can see that can only be sorted by "Artist".

Amazing and appalling that we have to do this kind of thing to make the new iTunes workable.

Please do send feedback to Apple about this. The feedback link is somewhere in this thread in another post.

While this could be a workaround for many people, it's still a workaround and you are quite right in stating it is amazing and appalling we have to resort to this kind of 'dirty' tricks. I, for one, will stick to iTunes 10.7 and I'm wondering what the next permutation of iTunes will bring: leave out the Composer field, suppress the Classical genre ... ?

Thank you for the link to the blog: it has the interesting idea of adding a pdf of the booklet at the end of the track list. Here is one more tip: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ has lots of scripts to make life easier. I regularly use scripts to put capitalization right, to search and replace or to append n characters to e.g. the album name of several CDs at once.

Just in case you want to downgrade, here's the link to a solution: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=16400819&postcount=6

And here is the link to the feedback page: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Happy listening!

I also agree. Classical libraries must be able to search and sort by a composer tab. I-Tunes is now useless for me. Reveals Apple's All American attitude- - If it's not pop culture it's not worth consideration.

Barmeno

I heard something about Composer View being part of the recent iTunes update. I couldn't find it, until I read this article:

http://www.mactrast.com/2013/02/how-to-activate-the-new-composers-view-in-itunes -11-0-2/

It needs to be 'turned on' in Preferences>General>Views

Thanks for addressing this Apple!

(And thank you MacTrast!)

Thank you for mentioning that. I have checked this out and it is a huge step forward. I am very glad that Apple have now included a Composers tab.

What I would like now is for Apple to include a prefence for changing the sort in Album view from Artist to Composer. That would turn Album view into something useful for me.

I am going to send a message about that using the feedback form now. I will congratulate them on the Composers tab first.

I found a way that might help:

1. Click

View --> Column Browser --> Show column browser

2. Click

View --> Column Browser --> Composer

3. It shows you some columns at the top and you can choose the composer that you want to sort by.

Not sure if this is helpful - it's a worse interface than it used to be, but it works!

Some time since this was posted and it's clear iTunes is less that interested in the griping of classical music fans. But I wanted to take a minute to offer a heartfelt thank you to Ιωσεφ for your entirely practical work-around. It serves nicely and is easily done. Very clever, thanks!

Hi all,

I've got the following problem:

I've added an album of Ravel to iTunes and filled out Composer "Maurice Ravel"; Composer for sorting "Ravel". I want to show the whole name in display (Maurice Ravel). But if I'm looking for him, I will instinctively search for R like Ravel (or B like Beethoven and not L for Ludwig or v for van Beethoven).

That works fine in iTunes, but after syncing to new iPhone 6, all Ravel albums are sorted into M like Maurice.

Do I misunderstand the whole concept? Are the sort fileds of iTunes only for iTunes itself, but not for the mobiles?

Kind regards

It sounds like you could solve your problem by putting the composer's surname first followed by a comma.

Yes indeed, it's best to keep the Composer's name always as standard as possible. I use 'Satie, Erik (1866-1925)', that way you have all Composers neatly listed in alphabetical order.

Here is a link to the MLA rules on how to describe musical sound recordings:

https://www.sunysccc.edu/library/researchhelp/MLA_Music_rev0709.pdf