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itunes will not sort by artist

I can not figure out how iTunes is grouping my songs when I try to sort by artist. Whether I view by artists & sort by album or view by song title & sort by artist it doesn't matter. Not only are they in no sort of alphabetical order but the artists are not even together. The only songs in order are ones that I've purchased after April 2014. Anything beyond that, about 2500 songs going back to 2010, including purchases straight from iTunes as early as February 2014, are in no order at all, completely jumbled. I've searched online for an answer & have tried everything. I've deleted everything except title, artist, and album (deleted album artist, sort artist, sort album etc.). I've unchecked compilation album, track #s etc... nothing is working. I even deleted iTunes from my computer &

re-downloaded it, put my music back on, waste of time. 😟 Hope someone can help...

iphone 5-OTHER, Windows 7, Sorting

Posted on Dec 18, 2014 8:51 PM

Reply
12 replies

Mar 3, 2015 1:04 PM in response to sukimo

Perhaps a screenshot showing what you think is wrong would help. I find that using the Artists view sorted by Album or the Songs view sorted by Artist gives me the Albums in alphabetical order within each Artist grouping. It shouldn't make much difference but I have complete Album Artist information rather than leaving it blank. The only thought that comes to mind is that iTunes might have somehow auto-corrected your empty values to spaces so it is sorting on something other that what you think is and then something else which might well be date of import to the library or some other arbitrary value.


If you enable the column browser, from the Songs view, and then View > Column Browser > Show Column Browser (if needed) which of the last two entries are ticked in the View > Column Browser sub menu? The settings here for Use Album Artists and Group Compilations have effects elsewhere in iTunes. From your description that isn't the issue, but if we are trying to make sense of a screenshot it is good to know which options are in force.


tt2

Mar 3, 2015 1:25 PM in response to turingtest2

Also, I've noted an anomaly in iTunes 12.1 where an "auto-populated" (greyed-out) Sort Album Artist is shown even though I've deleted the original Album Artist value - I take the opposite approach to you and only populate the latter field when its necessary, i.e., when there are variations in the Artist value across the tracks making up an album. In cases like this:

User uploaded file

- an album purchased from Amazon's MP3 store - the media initially has Artist and Album Artist populated with the same value ("The Chieftains") but when I delete the Album Artist values the derived value of Sort Album Artist is still there.

Mar 3, 2015 2:39 PM in response to turingtest2

I can remove these (just like yesterday's issue about grouping albums) by entering a "dummy" value for Album Artist and then deleting it again. Since I've only notice this in recent days and the presence of these "ghost" values seems to be in the Mostly Harmless category, I've not yet bothered to go through my library and remove them all. Definitely seems to affect digital purchases only, i.e., those that have an Album Artist value present on import - in this case:

User uploaded file

"The Chieftains 3" is an Amazon mp3 purchase whereas "The Chieftains 4" is imported from CD (and in my case would therefore never have had a value for Album Artist).

Mar 3, 2015 4:37 PM in response to turingtest2

Turns out that getting rid of the "Ghost" values was a simple as selecting the field, entering a space, deleting it immediately, and hitting OK. I was also able to use my modified version of your script against my complete library, pull the CSV into Access and run a query to find all the affected albums - there were only 13 of them - so not surprising that I might not have noticed this before. The only commonality is that all were, as I suspected, Amazon mp3 purchases - but by no means universal as that's only a small subset of the Amazon-sourced digital downloads in my library.


Another of iTunes' little mysteries ...

itunes will not sort by artist

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