How can you organize albums chronologically with multiple albums in same year?

Question

How can you organize albums chronologically with multiple albums in same year?

I pretty much have all my itunes in order except for one thing; organizing the albums chronologically. I've put in the dates for every album, but some artists have multiple albums in the same year, these albums are then placed alphabetically and out of order. (Ex: Simon & Garfunkel released their Sounds of Silence album in January 1966, along with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme later that year. Since P comes before S in the alphabet these albums are listed out of order.)

I've played around a little bit with sorting, but I'd like to keep the correct year information. Is there a spot to put in the exact release date?

iPhoto '11, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Feb 19, 2015 5:25 PM

Reply

Answer 1

hhgttg27

Level 5

5,591 points

Nov 8, 2015 9:48 AM in response to koolaidman2011

There's nothing built into iTunes to support this directly. However, I have addressed this issue by using the Sort Album field and setting this to <artist name> yyyymmdd where:

<artist name> is copied from Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist or Sort Album Artist - based on a scheme where Album Artist and Sort Album Artist are only populated when tracks within the album have varying Artist values, and Sort Artist / Sort Album Artist are used for individual artists to be sorted by <last name>, <first name>
yyyymmdd is the actual date of release

Using this approach you can sort by artist and title and get correct chronological sequencing. In your example I'd set the Sort Album values to "Simon & Garfunkel 19660117" and "Simon & Garfunkel 19661010" respectively.

Reply