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Sorting Issues

I have two issues that may be related. They both concern trying to listen to multiple-"song" works in the right order.


First, when I sort my songs by name, iTunes has its own idea of what the order should be, occasionally completely scrambling numerical order. The picture below shows an example. We should have each "Daphnis et Chloe" item in order of number (as the "Le Tombeau de Couperin" items below it are), but the order is 1, 3, 5, 21, 24, 15, 18, 8… Also, this applies only to certain works; the vast majority of the time, iTunes gets it right, but if it get a particular work wrong, it always gets it wrong.


User uploaded file


Similarly, iTunes seems to have a default order of songs for certain works that is not the original album order. This is a problem for smart playlists, which order certain things in really odd combinations; some works are split up among other works that weren't even in the same album. The picture below, snapped from a smart playlist, shows that the standard order for these unrelated works is to take a single movement ("song") from each of five works at a time: Whereas the "Micro-Symphony" should all be grouped together, the Beethoven concerto should be in one place, the Mozart serenade should be in one place, and each of the Bach works should be together, as they were in their original albums (and this selection represents at least four completely different albums), they are split up so that not even two adjacent movements are together in this particular case. In other (but much less common) cases, a group of songs from one album will be together, but in the wrong order (so that I end up listening to the first movement last). Is there a way to change this default order?


User uploaded file


Thanks,


-Timothy Moser

Posted on Dec 25, 2012 11:16 AM

Reply
20 replies

Dec 25, 2012 1:28 PM in response to TimothyDM

For the first case with Daphnis et Chloe, I would make sure that all the numbers are 2 digits. Change 1 to 01 etc.

iTunes doesn't "get it wrong". iTunes can only work with the material you give it. Only you can "massage" the data (in this case the song name) to make it work the way you want it to.


The second case, the playlist, it is not sorted at all as you have the heading for manual sorting highlighted. I suggest you also include the column for Album and sort on that. See if that works.

Dec 25, 2012 1:42 PM in response to kilima

Thanks for the response.


For the first case: Your suggestion does not make a difference (see attached image). iTunes uses a sorting method that allows sorting to work between single and multiple digits. I have many multi-movement works in my iTunes library that are sorted correctly whether I use one or two digits for the single-digit movements. And even if this were not so, your explanation would not account for the crazy order that I showed in my image, with two-digit numbers mixed up with single-digit numbers. (Just to make sure that it should be right, all the text before the number for each song is copied and pasted, so it should certainly be sorting based on the number.) iTunes does "get it wrong" somehow; it must be sorting based on something that isn't there. Notice that the songs starting with "Ballet" come after the song starting with "Bolero", and "Waltz" is thrown in at a strange spot (between "Jeux" and "Le"); even letter sorting is sometimes messed up. Does anyone know what exactly iTunes is sorting by if not the actual text in the name field?


For the second case: I know this is not a sorting issue; I sorted by "manual sorting" on purpose to demonstrate the issue I described. My question is why iTunes' smart playlists update the songs in this berserk, seemingly arbitrary order, and whether there is a way to change that.


-Timothy


User uploaded file

Dec 25, 2012 6:49 PM in response to kilima

Thank you, that addresses the whole sorting issue. I totally didn't realize there was a Sort Name field. Now, I suppose some albums come with this filled out? That is inconvenient if I want to resort by name, but at least now I know how to address the problem if sorting by name doesn't seem to work right.


I'm still curious about the second issue (this strange behind-the-scenes standard ordering of songs) for anyone who knows something about this.

Dec 26, 2012 10:15 AM in response to kilima

iTunes seems to have a behind-the-scenes ordering of songs, completely separate from sorting by album, name, or anything else. It's not a matter of sorting; it's just a background thing, but it surfaces when you create a smart playlist. You can see it in your own iTunes library if you simply create a smart playlist that includes all of your songs. This "order" is the order in which the songs appear in the playlist. Sometimes this order seems very arbitrary; it is not related to add date, album, or anything else you think it should be related to. How does iTunes decide in what order to add these songs? (I understand this is probably not a problem that many other people have, but as I like to change my smart playlists all the time, it creates complications for me and I'm curious as to why iTunes does this.)

Dec 26, 2012 10:44 AM in response to kilima

Yes, I understand that. Again, this is a problem that may be largely unique to the way I use iTunes. I specify my own order, because iTunes does not support grouping multiple movements by work (a glaring deficiency for classical/art music fans, and an entirely different topic). For this reason, sorting by album, name, or anything else like that does not work for me. Consequently, the "any order" that you're talking about actually matters to me. Smart playlists do not add songs in a random order; they do it based on an internally specified order that seems to be completely in the background and unrelated to anything I can manage. Every time I update a smart playlist, iTunes adds the songs using this strange standard order (which is the same every time, not random as your "any order" statement would seem to indicate). I'm wondering if anyone else knows anything about this.

Dec 26, 2012 11:56 AM in response to TimothyDM

If there is no sort order specified for your smart playlist and you change the selection parameters, then the selection has to be completely re-evaluated. Have some of your previously selected songs now disappeared ?. Have new songs been added ?. And what goes where, depends entirely on the changes made. There is no black magic. If you don't specify how you want things sorted, iTunes will add things to the playlist in the manner that it sees fit.

How does it see fit ? Presumably in the order it evaluates the selection criteria, followed presumably by the order of the items in your library as it searches. That result is random because it has no relation to the fields you have selected. It is random and you can not and should not depend on it, no matter that you want to and are trying to and are irritated beacause it won't bend to your will. You should not depend on it, because the next iTunes might have a different and more efficient way to evaluate and select which will give another random order.


If you want things in order you have to sort them. That is a fact of the universe.

If "name" is not sufficient to get your desired order, then you have to fix the name.

That's what Sort Name is for. Try it and see.


Sorry if it seems that I'm "banging on", but you must stop blaming iTunes and learn how to "massage" your data so that it behaves the way you want it to. 🙂

Dec 27, 2012 10:43 AM in response to kilima

Okay, so basically, the way this kind of music works is you have multiple songs grouped together by "work". An average work may have four movements, and the vast majority of my songs are multi-movement works. Each movement is typically shown in iTunes as its own track or "song". However, these movements are not listened to individually; an entire work is listened to all in one piece. Here's a typical snapshot from my library:


User uploaded file


Each track name fits this formula: [catalogue number] [work name] [movement number] [movement name]

For example, number 530: [Op. 4] ["Intermezzi for piano"] [movement 5] ["Allegro moderato"]


I would like to listen to the whole "Intermezzi for piano", all six tracks (movements) in order, every time I hear it. The same is true for the "Requiem", the "Concerto for 2 Violins in D minor", and several hundred other works in my music collection.


Most ideally, I would love to be able to shuffle by work. However, since iTunes does not support this, I have followed the steps below to simulate shuffling by work. (Note that even the process I describe here no longer works with the new version of iTunes since the shuffle function has changed.)


1. Click the "shuffle" button to view all songs in the playlist in a pseudorandom order.

2. Select the first few songs in the playlist to create a pseudorandom selection of works.

3. Click the "unshuffle" button and then sort by name.

4. Carefully go through the playlist from top to bottom, finding each selected song and expanding the selection to include all the rest of the movements in the same work.

5. Drag all the selected songs to the bottom of the playlist and begin listening from the first selected track. Repeat when the end of the playlist is reached.


Obviously a major problem occurs when some of the movements from a particular work are out of order, as is the case with the "Requiem" in the image above (it's normally right, but this Requiem and a few other works are always wrong). To get around this, a sixth step is to look through my selection and reorder the songs so that each work is ordered correctly. Also, of course, my selection process statistically favors works with a greater number of movements; and then, as already mentioned, the new iTunes does not support step 1, so I have instead been scrolling and clicking blindly to create my selection.


So it all comes down to listening to multi-movement works as a whole (and, of course, with the movements in the correct order).

Sorting Issues

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