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Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist Keep Populating

In the Get Info box (which I have been struggling with since Apple made changes some while back to make it act completely differently to the way it used to...) when I add a new album or edit an existing one I'm getting the sort artist and sort album artist randomly setting themselves to the value in the artist and album artist fields.


I'm used to seeing "The Flaming Lips", for example, in the Artist field becoming a greyed out "Flaming Lips" in Sort Artist but now I'm getting "Kaytranada" Artist giving me a black "Kaytranada" Sort Artist. It would only be mildly annoying if it was consistent but on the Kaytranada album it's done it for 10 of the 15 tracks.


Is it possible to find out if this is a bug, if it's likely to be fixed?


Thanks

PC-OTHER, Windows 10

Posted on May 6, 2016 1:41 AM

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Posted on May 6, 2016 7:45 AM

Is this the only album you are having problems with? Did you download the album from iTunes (or import from a CD)?


As far as "splitting" the tracks, is the album a compilation:


If you see unexpected groups of songs when you browse an album - Apple Support

6 replies

May 6, 2016 7:54 AM in response to javaliga

Hi there and thanks for replying...

No, Kaytranada is just an example. Of the albums I've added today it's happened on Christine & The Queens, Anohni and the Kill Bill Vol 1 soundtrack. Kill Bill is a Various Artists compilation and the other two are single artist albums. It hasn't happened on any of the tracks on the LUH album (another single artist album) strangely enough.

These are downloads from Google Play.

May 9, 2016 12:53 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks again for replying... I'm trying to get a handle on exactly what is happening when so I can describe it better but it's not that easy... As best I can describe it, it isn't so much that the fields are pre-populated (which I hadn't seen happen before but can live with) but that when I clear them - which I can't seem to do by simply deleting them but have to change them to something else first, save, and then delete them - they populate again the next time I edit another tag, but not consistently, so some tracks end up with the sort fields populated and some don't.


I'm basically just going to leave them be as the resulting inconsistency is annoying me more than the actual setting of the fields in the first place.


Thanks for the offer of the Auto Sort script but I'm a bit anal about the order albums appear in and I use the sort fields to make albums appear chronologically within artist and to make artists appear alphabetically by surname so the last thing I want is to reset them to Apple's defaults!

May 9, 2016 1:04 PM in response to EW99

Ah, fair enough. One "feature" of the newer Get Info window is that if you edit the principle value, the corresponding sort value gets wiped out. This is annoying when there was a value there you wanted to preserve (I use custom sort values to sort numeric items in order - a feature introduced in iTunes 7 and then broken and never fixed! 😮) however if you want to clear the sort fields then adding say a trailing X to the main field, applying the change, and then going back in to remove it will do the trick. That can often be easier than trying to delete the sort value in Get Info.


tt2

Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist Keep Populating

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