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.
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?
Thanks,
-Timothy Moser