Why won't my audio-books sort by title in iTunes?

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Level 1

7 points

Why won't my audio-books sort by title in iTunes?

This is a repeat of a closed thread. The solution there was to down grade to the previous release. I am running several releases ahead of the versions mentioned if the previous thread and sorting by title whether title is the primary sorting key or if in grid view it sort by author and then by title. I looked at the sorting tab in the audio-book information tab and everything appears to be correct. Alphabetic sorting is something computers are very good at.* There are various encoding that can be used UTF-8 and other Unicode for other languages which could complicate it a bit but there are class libraries and functions that handle that issue. All the titles in question are using the Latin character set.

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*Unless you are using EBCDIC but we are on an Apple site and they don't. I am not an expert on MP3 tags but hopefully they don't either.

iTunes-OTHER, Windows 10

Posted on Sep 12, 2018 8:51 PM

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Answer 1

Unix Guru Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 13, 2018 5:50 AM in response to turingtest2

Showing the extra columns was the hint I needed. In my example the one audio book that was out of order was one I did not run the script against. Looks like to get a consistent ordering every chapter of every book needs to be done. 😟

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Sep 13, 2018 2:06 AM in response to Unix Guru

See Organizing audiobook chapters.

tt2

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Answer 3

Unix Guru Author

Level 1

7 points

Sep 13, 2018 4:43 AM in response to turingtest2

Been there done that. My complaint is once the books only appear once in the grid view they are not consistently alphabetized. For example, and I have others, I have the J.R.R.Tolkien series "The Lord of the Rings" I abbreviate LotR. In the grid display it goes:

"LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring"
"LotR: The Two Towers"
"The Simarillion"
"LotR: The Return of the King"

Obviously #3 is out of place. The strings above are both the title and the 'sort by' name.

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Answer 4

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Sep 13, 2018 5:28 AM in response to Unix Guru

Use the List view and enable the columns Name (Chapter), Sort Name, Author (Artist), Sort Artist, Album Artist, Sort Album Artist, Album (Title), Sort Album, Composer & Sort Composer. I would expect to see some kind of inconsistency that would explain the sort order that you see. For single items you can edit in that view by tapping twice slowly in text fields. For multiple tracks use Get Info, change the Media Kind to Music on the Options tab, to make changes to fields that aren't otherwise shown, then set the Media Kind back to Audiobook before clicking OK. My personal style would start by making Artist=Album Artist=Composer=J.R.R. Tolkien, Sort Artist=Sort Album Artist=Sort Composer=Tolkien, J.R.R. I would then use the original book titles with sort values of the form <Series> <Index>, E.g. Middle Earth 02 for The Fellowship of the Ring. This means that when I view my books/audiobooks arranged by title each series is still grouped together and in order.

tt2

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