Not playing classical music movements in order

Controls > Shuffle > Groupings.

As long as all of the movements are tagged with the same Grouping value then they ought to play together when you shuffle. See also Organize your classical music in iTunes - Apple Support for an archived support document on the work and movement features that are supposed to make organizing classical music somewhat better in recent versions of iTunes. Using a common value for Work ought to have the same effect.

tt2

For each group of things that you want to keep together, select them, get info, and place a unique identifier in the Grouping field. E.g. if you want all of Giselle to play as one just put in Giselle, or you could select the tracks of act 1 and act 2 in turn and use Giselle, Act 1 and Giselle, Act 2. If you then shuffle by grouping tracks with no grouping will still play randomly but any grouping should be played from start to finish in sequence when it comes up.

tt2

Seeing as you're running on a Mac it should be possible to write a little AppleScript to copy values from work to grouping, or vice versa, or swap the values around. I've written the last one already since I'm importing a subset of my main library into a separate iCloud Music Library and work is filled in when I want it to be grouping (I use the field to control smart lists) and it would be easily modified to CopyWorkGrouping or CopyGroupingWork if those were the functions you needed.

Copy everything between the two lines into the Script Editor and save it as SwapWorkGrouping.scpt, or a more appropriate title if you change it slightly.

-- SwapWorkGrouping - V1.1 - © Steve MacGuire - 2018-02-19

tell application "iTunes"

if selection is not {} then

set sel to selection

repeat with aTrack in sel

set g to grouping of aTrack

set w to work of aTrack

set grouping of aTrack to w

set work of aTrack to g

end repeat

end if

end tell

You can comment out line 8 or 9 if you don't need it. To use the script select some tracks in iTunes first, then run the script with the play button in the script editor.

tt2

TT2 - thanks for reaching out to help with this.

I've got my classical music in a playlist

Then I labeled for movements

I set it to "shuffle by grouping"

BUT...it still shuffles by each song, not for the entire concert.

Thoughts on what I need to do? See attached for a screen shot of one song.

This didn't work for me. What now?

What is the exact issue that you have? Are you trying to Shuffle by Grouping and are appropriate values for grouping set?

tt2

I got the groupings set up, but I hit "shuffle" it still plays individual movements, not the entire piece.

I just realized that "shuffle by grouping" is an option. I selected that and it still didn't work. It's picking individual movements.

that worked. thank you!

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2