How to fix sorting artist problems?

Question

Level 1

0 points

How to fix sorting artist problems?

Hey, I need some help here.

So I got a MacBook Air and synced it with my iPhone 5s, I lost all my iPhone music and started adding them over again but I noticed something which is frustrating to me. For example:

Artist: A Day To Remember

When I transfer it to my iPhone, I open the app and it is sorted only as "Day To Remember" even when in the iPhone Music Library in my Mac it's listed as "A Day To Remember", after B's.

Same happens with some artists that start with THE.

I don't understand what's going on and fixing the tags in the iPhone music library is useless. And now the Mac library is not solving the problem either (Already tried checking and fixing the album artist and "sort as" types and still no response.)

Does anyone know the source to this issue?

Thanks

JM

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014), iOS 8.2, iPhone 5S

Posted on Mar 30, 2015 8:59 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Limnos

Level 10

411,163 points

Apr 1, 2015 9:04 PM in response to _juanmanuel_

iTunes ignores definite and indefinite articles. There may be ways to trick it to sort by them if you really wish to do so. Perhaps by using an underline after the article?

Reply

Answer 2

hhgttg27

Level 5

5,591 points

Apr 5, 2015 9:31 AM in response to Limnos

There are actually several workarounds for this:

You can manually override the automatically-generated sort values - so if you want albums by The Beatles to sort by "T" rather than "B" you can enter "The Beatles" in the Sort Artist field
turingtest2 has created a VBScript that will do this automatically for a range of selected items - see the UnAutoSort script on this page.
If you're feeling really adventurous, you can modify iTunes' behavior for sort names by editing the appropriate version of the SortPrefixes.plist file - depending on your versions of Windows/iTunes this will be in C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources\en.lproj or C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.Resources\en.lproj (for US English), or the relevant folder in iTunes Resources for other languages. Note that any changes here will need to be repeated after every iTunes update as the file is reset to its default values by the installation process.

(Edit: obviously the references above are for Windows, I'm not sure whether there's a Mac equivalent of turingtest2's script but editing the SortPrefixes.plist file will work on Mac as well, allowing for variations in iTunes' folder structures).

Reply