How to play albums by one artist in chronological order?

If you're prepared to invest the time in setting it up you can do this in iTunes as it is today. The "trick" is to set the value of each album's Sort Album tag so that when setting iTunes to sort by title its actually sorting by artist and release date. I do this by setting Sort Album to "<artist> yyyymmdd" where:

• <artist> is the most significant of Sort Album Artist, Sort Artist, Album Artist or Artist
• yyyymmdd is the actual release date of the album, with some necessary approximations where the actual date may not be known - so something where the documented release date is May 1971 would be entered as 19710501, or one that's only known to have been released in 1967 would be 19670101. In cases where has an artist has two releases in a given year where the actually release dates are not known (but the order of release is) you can use approx. values to get the sequence right - e.g., yyyy0101 for the first release, yyyy0701 for the second. For the rare instances of an artist with two (or more) releases on the same date, I append "-1", "-2", etc to the Sort Album value.

Main benefits are that iTunes then gets correct chronological order even for multiple albums released in the same year (standard sorting by Artist and Year sorts those with the same Year value by album title), and iDevices that just sort albums by title display them in "correct" order.

You can suggest enhancements using the iTunes feedback page. I wouldn't hold my breath, though, since the majority of iTunes / iDevice users seem to prefer to listening to randomly selected / randomly ordered songs rather than complete albums. I imagine, too, that those wanting to listen to one artist's albums in chronological order would be a smaller minority ... though I must admit an occasional urge to listen to all 248 Grateful Dead albums in my library (30.4 days worth) in sequence 😉