itunes 11 not sorting songs alphabetically

Well for me it behaves even worse.

I just (6 hours ago and still baffled) upgraded to Itunes 11.

I mainly have Audiobooks in my Media Center. But since i am an oldschool guy who baught them in a shop and imported them with itunes they were not stored as audiobooks but as music.

I didnt care much, and well to be honest i found it cool, that i didnt have to push extra buttons to move from usic to an audibook.

You all know that the order of the "songs" in an audiobook is quite important to an extent that it becomes useless and rather a pain than a joy when its §$§$%& up.

To get this straight all tracks ID´3 tags were fully edited (dfor those where it didnt work properly at import) and for all my ~100 gB audiobooks following information was provided:

- Tracknames in alphabetical order (so if that was a sort criteria i would have been fine)

- Tracknumber was provided (so yeah if someone would have decided to switch itunes sorting to this criteria, things would have been fine)

- For Multidisc Audiobooks where there were similar tracknames after import, tracknumber and CD number were provided (... would have been fine)

Now i have 0 chance like it seems to have any impact on the sort order of the album view or the authro view.

Yeah like someone earlier stated it works in title view. But if thats the only working view, what purpose do those other views serve? I have assigned auhtor and album names to my audiobooks in a manner so i can relate. Now i have to start my audiobooks in the title view, cause in every other view the audiobook jumps from track 1 to 13 to 98 to 3 and so on.

Like mentioned above i have quite a mass of audiobooks and browsing my title view is ****.

Well there still IS a way to get it done over the title view but it isnt a nice solution tbh. For me itunes 11 so far didnt ADD but remove convenience. That makes me sad as i work in the it idustry as well and know how much worr you guys put in there but in the end i would have been way happier if i hadnt upgraded.

In the past i could safeley click on "OK-do it" when apple sent me upgrades in the future i better wait some weeks now and check for threads like this.

Any tipps that could help me?

I have one idea myself but to be honest i dont want to edit trackinformations of every single track of around 100 gig of audibook mp3s.

Have you run across Audiobooks on iPods yet? May help to enable Edit > Preferences > General > Show list views for all media and sort as Album by Artist, assuming that order worked for you before.

tt2

So I agree that this is lame and a step backwards IMHO. I have nearly 800GB's of mostly live music. The majority of it is not tagged.

The files are generally named like this: artist-venue-date-d01t01.flac and as such sorting by filename worked great, until the last update. Now when I look at an "Album" the sort is all screwed up.

It is also my humble opinion that iTunes is just lame. Unfortunately for me, I listen to a fair amount of High-def music and the program I use requires iTunes.

Seriously, how hard is it to let people sort things how they want, anywhere they want. iTunes is seriously lacking.

I think I've figured out how to sort songs in my individual playlists and then sync the changes to the ipod. It's not elegant, but I think how I did it was to open iTunes. I then plugged in my ipod. Once device is recognized by iTunes, I click on the iPod button (top right side of pane). Select "on this iPod" in tile bar. Click on the playlist I want to sort. Click the "add to" icon (right side of pane). Under the title of playlist and number of songs, there a drop menu for sorting. Select "sort by manual order".

That should do it.

Note: this process is for the new (and confusing) iTunes 11.

nvm

I am new to posting here, and I did not see my question addressed so far. I have 15,000 tunes organized alphabetically by artist last name first. When I opened iTunes earlier this week all artists had been re-arranged to first name first. Is there a way to correct this back to how I want the songs arranged?

How did you organize the last name first order? If you used sort fields has this information been cleared, or do you simly need to change the sort column? A screenshot may gives an idea of what you see now which we can relate to what you had before.

tt2

I spent dozens of hours manually organizing the artists by last name first by using Get Info. Not too much to understand. A screen shot shows artists are now listed first name first.

Now iTunes isn't adding recent imported CDs into the alphabetical mix, but just ading the imports to the end of the "Songs" column.

And now my entire library except for imports and downloads of the last week is GONE!!!

If iTunes dumped your media see this post.

In addition to the sort fields I described you can also click on a column heading to sort on that column. Sometimes a screenshot helps to short circuit the twenty questions game, where I don't think of asking the relevant question because I assume something obvious.

tt2

Hey tt2.. this is an old thread, but my problem's kinda relevant and it looks like you might be able to help.

Big problems sorting in iTunes 11 - I like to sort music in my own way (original album content first, followed by cover/live versions etc), but I haven't been able to figure it out. The screenshots are in column browser, and you can see the '21' album with original album content sorted AFTER the covers etc.

The difference between the two groups are the track numbers - original content has them, cover/live content does not. This is the way I want to keep it, so that the album itself is tracklisted, but the "extra content" is tacked on without being numbered. I want the original album sorted first though, and apparently iTunes has stopped playing ball since iteration 11.

Next screen shot is the Get Info box (sorting tab to be specific) with a whole host of manual sorting options.

It used to be that the "Sort Name" field allowed you to custom sort an album, as a primary sort overriding even the track numbers. In iT10, this function worked, and I would use sort name '1' for the original album content; sort name '2' for the extras.

I sent an email to TCook and actually got a reply, then a referral through to the engineers. Their response was that "it's supposed to be like that" so I was a bit miffed - this used to be functional in iT10 but is an obvious bug. My workaround was to separate everything onto different disk numbers, but with the (somewhat recent) visual changes to disks (being separated by different headers), it just breaks the feel of a whole album.

Anyway, feel free to call this one as too hard basket.. but if you wouldn't mind having a look - I'd really appreciate it. I'm in touch with Apple's Exec. Cust. Relations, and they're acting as a go between with the engineers now, but even screencastings aren't convincing them there's a problem. I think this might've been some of the other guys' problem too, just put in a different way.

Again, any insight would be awesome.

Cheers - Michael

You should be grateful that Apple thinks they are smarter than you are. 🙂

Just kidding of course, but seriously, Apple needs to let us think and sort for ourselves. iTunes 11 stinks since we cant sort the way we want.

Just downgrade yourself and dont accept anymore updates.

Hi Michael,

If you want the bonus tracks treated as part of the album, and in a specific order (or at least after the official tracks), then there really isn't any solution other than to add your own track numbers, particularly if using the disc number doesn't work for you. Sort name won't override the track order for album-based views.

It's a shame the new feature to split the listing by disc number isn't optional.

tt2