itunes 11 not sorting songs alphabetically

I'm stuck. Notice in this screenshot the songs are out of order within the Album. I have confirmed that ALL the sort information on all the tracks are EXACTLY the same. You may also note there are several Albums that iTunes recognizes as being different when they too are EXACTLY the same. Frustration is washing over me. Could someone please explain where I am going wrong?

Details of the various causes of split and disordered albums, and workarounds for the same, are at Grouping tracks into albums.

Most likely explanation for the details shown are that tracks 4-7 are marked as Disc 1 (of 1) while the others have no disc number.

tt2

turingtest2 wrote:

Most likely explanation for the details shown are that tracks 4-7 are marked as Disc 1 (of 1) while the others have no disc number.

As a test, I removed the disc x of x from one track on an album, switched to a different album and then back to the original one. Sure enough, the test track was now incorrectly listed after every other track, and therefore out of track order.

Oh, this is out of order. I have experienced similar levels of frustration with not being able to do in this new version of iTunes the things that I customarily did without even thinking in the previous version, having only had my Air for about 8 months: I just got used to the way it all worked and now... So please cut medic6578 some slack and try to understand what is the problem. It's always easy when you know or can make IT (geddit? it and Information Technology) do what you want it to do, but don't lose sight of the tear-inducing frustration when nothing you do makes any difference and IT just won't achieve what you want it to!

As for myself, I have decided to stick with viewing as Songs and sorting as I wish, even though I prefer to see the albums as thumbnails. iTunes doesn't work how I would like it to anyway, so it's always a poor substitute / work around. I fell in love with a purple iMac G3 in about 2000 and it's been downhill ever since...! (Still bought this beautiful Air though!).

Merry Christmas!

I still don't understand media6578's specific issues with iTunes 11 as they've yet to explain them clearly enough. It is much easier to help with a concrete example, such as the track order issue given by gstreech above, than with a general "it doesn't work the way I want/need/expect it to", particularly if you don't describe the want/need/expectation.

With the exception of the descriptions of the display modes the Grouping tracks into albums article remains relevant to iTunes 11. Logical & consistent editing of tag information will usually get the desired results. If that doesn't work I'm prepared to spend time analyzing the issue, trying to reproduce it, creating a new workaround if possible, writing scripts to make complex changes easier to implement, filing bug reports if appropriate, etc. However I'm not psychic. If I haven't understood the problem then being grumpy with me won't make me any more enlightened.

Happy Christmas to one and all...

tt2

turingtest2 wrote:

If I haven't understood the problem then being grumpy with me won't make me any more enlightened.

Get used to it Steve. You may recall that I've had a great deal of grumpiness directed towards me in the past few months. One from a long-time contributor to the forum. I don't know what I did to upset him/her, but wow! did I get an ear bashing!

Phil

That worked. Thank you.

I knew it would do it, just painful trying to figure it out. I hope the app designers are trolling the boards looking for ways to eliminate the braindamage of learning the program.

Again, thank you for your time to reply and get me straight.

Merry Chirstmas! (if you don't celebrate Christmas, then Merry last Tuesday of December!)

Ok here's my major frustration with iTunes 11 vs iTunes 10 - inability to have complete control over user definied PRIMARY and SECONDARY sort criteria in GRID view.

For example: I have a Smart Playlist in which all items have the GENRE "Classical". Go to any library or music shop and you will see that classical music sections are not always sorted according to ARTIST. Sometimes, for example, you will find items group according to COMPOSER. iTunes 11 continues to let you set various SORTING parameters for each track (click on any track or album and click FILE-->GET INFO , select the SORTING tab) in GRID VIEW restricts you to selecting a primary sort criteria as only TITLE, ARTIST, GENRE, YEAR, RATING and secondary sort critera as only TITLE, ARTIST, YEAR, RATING. In grid view, SORT ALBUM, SORT COMPOSER, SORT ARTIST are not available.

More sort criteria is available in list view but list view is a wholly unsatisfactory of viewing a large collection of items. For us old-timers who once collected vinyl records, the grid view best replicates the experience of being able to select an album for a new playlist.

In any event: Since moving my CD and vinyl record collection (and digital only additions since then), I have found, until this release of iTunes 11, that the various fields one is able to tag each track can be immensely helpful in sorting and viewing in GRID view. No longer. Please Apple: Let users set their own PRIMARY and SECONDARY sort criteria using any combination of tags. (Really impress us with a THIRD sort criteria possibility!)

davidakin:

If you head into the Playlists view, and turn on the top menu bar (using CTRL+B), you can then choose View/Column Browser/Show Column Browser and then View/Column Browser and choose the Composer option, while removing any of the fields you don't want;

and once that's done, you have this:

Note that the Show Column Browser is for that Playlist only. If you switch to another Playlist, the column browser will not be displayed unless you turn it on for that Playlist.

Here you go, simple explanation, if I look at a reading list, the songs are sorted as they should be, from 1 to 14.

But, in album mode, the songs are no longuer sorted, iTunes seems to be very peculiar in how it sorts those songs and they are no way (that I could find) to change the sorting order.

Although browsing in album mode is a lot of fun, it is very frustrating for people like me who like their albums to play in the intended order.

Unless there is something else I can't see from the second image I think perhaps there are two separate problems. Your listing appears to show tracks that have no proper track number, but have leading numbers in the textual name field. Note the difference in this listing:

See how the numbers appear with no leading zeros and in a different colour. In contrast your song names seem to read ##-<Name> instead of just <Name>. Are the track numbers filled in at all? I suspect not.

The second issue can be caused when the pattern of disc. numbers is inconsistent. If I deliberately alter three tracks like this:

Then it confuses the order when we go back to the album:

If the track numbers are already populated my script TrimName could be used to strip off the first three characters, otherwise I could write a script to copy the track numbers over first.

I'm not sure what you mean by Reading List. I only get the display with the album art on the right and blended colours in the Albums view, but it doesn't surprise me if it is possible for two views to show different orders if the data isn't absolutely consistent. An early build of iTunes 10 (I think) completely ignored disc numbers, randomly interleaving tracks from disc 1 and disc 2, but I wasn't affected as I routinely use absolute track numbers across the whole album.

tt2

These are just tracks I imported from the finder. The numbers in front of the tracks are part of the name of the files on disk. They are all part of the same album, which I did double check, and I modified. The setting to specify the track number out of so many tracks is not used but I never needed it before.

This strange behaviour is new in iTunes 11. Before, it always behaved correctly (from my perspective) and sorted the tracks alphabetically (in this case from 01 to 14).

I personally think this is a change for the worse.

As for the reading list, I always import an album as a list (by dragging the folder into the list pane) and then do a group change to the songs to ensure that they behave as an album. So, when I select the list everything is fine.

Finally, my experience with disk1 and disk2 is that iTunes 10 behave correctly and separated the disk one liste would follow the second list in the album (I am not sure I am clear here).

I hope I was more clear this time.

Reading List translates better as Playlist.

It seems clear to me from the evidence that your tracks don't have track numbers in the track number field, but rather the numbers that are there are part of the name field. Unless the files are correctly tagged the behaviour in iTunes will be unpredicatable.

I hadn't realized you have a Mac, but my scripts are for Windows. Doug's Script TrackPrefixToNumber will be able to copy the track numbers from the Name field into the Track No. field. Having copied over the track numbers you can then use the script RemoveNChars to trim the Name.

I haven't got time this morning to try to reproduce the result where the track order is different in the two views. They are identical for me while using the details in the middle image of my post, or the correct values. Perhaps when there are no track numbers at all some other value comes into play in one view but not the other. Nevertheless once correctly tagged the track order will become fixed.

It is generally considered unnecessary to create playlists for every album since these can already be accessed via the Column Browser or Grid views. The more playlists you have the longer iTunes takes to process updates to the library.

tt2

I'm having the same problem. I'm SICK of iTunes 11. I've used iTunes for years without problem. On Saturday, I decided to sell my vinyl, and therefore download it all. I thought it would take a couple of hours. Three days later, it's still not done. Not only do I find 11 extemely difficult to navigate, worse - it behaves completely without reason, which means you can't work out the problem. I have spent hours trying to do simple things, like ordering songs in an album by track number.

Firstly, in the Songs view, I have no number column - so I can't order that way. Secondly, even though in Explorer the tracks have the correct numbers in the name and the # column, they still don't order correctly in iTunes. Thirdly, whenever I reimport the tracks into iTunes, it does what it wants to and screws up the numbers in the file names - adding '1 -' to the front of the every track, for no reason. I'm going round in circles. And yes, the meta data in GetInfo is correct too.

iTunes 11 is the biggest pile of pants ever.

ETA: after hours, worked out what the problem was. Some of the tracks had '1' in the 'Disc' field, and some didn't. Oh my God.

In the Songs view you can right-click the column headings to select more fields to display.

iTunes adds leading disc numbers to the track's filename unless the disc number is not present, or reads 1 of 1.

See Grouping tracks into albums for general tips.

tt2