How to sort by year > album >title

iTunes doesn't cater for multi-valued sub-sorting. There are a few built in sorts that work that way, e.g. Album by Artist, but if sorting by Year doesn't get what you're after then there isn't another way to force it. What you could do is export or copy the metadata into say Excel and sort it there.

tt2

If you create a playlist with the content there is probably a way to export it, sort it, and reimport it in the new order. Or you could manually sort it if the numbers involved aren't too great.

It is worth nothing that year doesn't have to be consistent across an album, so you'd need to decide how to address that potential issue.

tt2

Somewhat dirty and a bit manual, but faster than building a script, or experimenting with exporting and importing. Make two new playlists, e.g. A & B, Sort the original list by year, select every track from the first year, drag these into A then delete from the original list. Switch to list A, sort this list as either Album, or Album by Artist, right-click on the playlist name and click Copy to Play Order, select everything in list a (CtrlA) and drag it to list B, then delete all from list A. Make sure list B is set to manual order (i.e. sort on the left-most column of numbers. Repeat until all years have been copied over to list B. When finished the original list and A should be redundant and empty. B should have what you want in the correct order. Name it as you wish.

tt2

If you set the Sort Album view to a combination of release date and artist name you should get what you want - if you sort by Title you'll get all the 1999 albums ordered by artist name, then the 2000 albums, etc.

I use a similar (though to me much more logical) approach which is to set the Sort Album to be the artist name followed by the date of release in yyyymmdd format. I find this useful in two ways:

• My iTunes library is ordered exactly as my CD collection: by artist and then in chronological release order. Including the release data allows cases where an artist has more than one album in a given year to be handled properly.
• On iDevices which sort albums by title only, again this gives the "right" order based on Artist.

Using this approach I have the Sort Album value for "Sergeant Pepper" set to "Beatles 19670601" (which means, for example, that its always sorted before "Magical Mystery Tour", whose Sort Album value is "Beatles 19671127").

If you reverse this approach you'd get the following order when sorting albums by title:

Including the Artist name in the Sort Album values here is necessary only if you're interested in the order of albums that happen to have been released on the same date.

There's nothing in iTunes that will do this automatically. When I set up my sorting system I did most of it manually - over a period of many months - though the time-consuming part was more finding and confirming release dates rather than entering the data into iTunes. Despite the multitude of sources on the 'net there are plenty of older albums where release date info may just be year or month/year, so you'd need to adopt a convention as to how to handle these. Due to compatibility with a home-grown database that integrates with my iTunes library, I would capture a release date that's just "1969" as 19690101 and one of "May 1969" as 19690501.

There are a couple of possible approaches that you could use, depending on the level of detail you're interested in. Both would make use of tt2's VBScripts for Windows(with some adaptation for your use case).

• If you just want to sort by year and then artist, use a script that reads the Year and Sort Artist (or Artist if Sort Artist is not set), concatenates these, and inserts the result in the Sort Album tag - obviously this assumes that you already have Year values for everything in your library.
• If you want the full yyyymmmdd date, you'll still need to do the work to find these out and document them. Once you have that data, you'd need a script (possibly more than one) that can read the tags from your library, match them up with the release date information, and then write the results back. This is a non-trivial exercise as you need to handle the fact that where you would probably capture this information per album iTunes will have to have the information replicated per track, and that writing back information to iTunes may have dependency on internal IDs that are not readily available through its API.

The other possibility would be to use a 3rd party tool that's more suitable for bulk changes to the tags within your media files, and then use tt2's Update Tag Infoscript to "push" these changes into the iTunes database.

To be honest, unless you really care about your preferred sorting order this may fall into the "more bother than its worth" category 😟