Sort album by artist or album by artist/year & compliations behavior

I am running iTunes 10.4.1.10 on Windows 7 (64-bit)
I was wondering about the behavior of sort album by artist or album by artist/year. Instead of sorting solely by artist or artist/year, it seems to take into account album artist. Is this correct? Previous versions of iTunes (iTunes 7 and iTunes 8) used only the album and artist field not album artist. Is there anyway to force it to sort solely by artist and ignore album artist?
I am wondering because I currently use the album artist field to hold information about featured artists, featured instrumentalists, conductors, alternative band names, etc and reserve the artist field to describe the more generalized album artist. For me, this organizational scheme works better because my iPod does not feature offer any access to album artist. My current solutions are to roll back to iTunes 7 or 8 or change the sort album artist field for every entry which has information in the album artist field; neither of which are long term solutions.
Finally, I would like to group compliations (musical soundtracks, movie soundtracks, etc) where the artist might differ by album but still use the sort by album by artist to organize the rest of my music using List View. Is this possible?
I really wish iTunes provided more options for sorting music.
Thanks!

Album Artist has been supported since iTunes 7 (7.1 I think) and normally takes preference over Artist when it comes to grouping tracks in iTunes. As you say the iPod Classic doesn't work quite the same way. You'll find my extensive thoughts on fixing things at http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp You might find that different vlaues of Group Compilations and Use Album Artists restore the view you were familiar with, otherwise it might be time to rethink the strategy.
If it is simply a mattter of swapping Album Artist with Artist then I can (and will) rustle up a script for that... It will end up on the list at http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp shortly. More complex rearrangements of properties are also possibe once you know what you want to achieve.
tt2

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I have my iTunes library sorted after “Artist”. Which gives me nothing but trouble with collections or collaborations.
So what I would like to do is have iTunes to ignore the default or general sorting by “Artist”. And instead sort only this album by “Album Artist”.
I have 12 songs with the same album title, same genre, same album artist but with different song names and artist.
But regardless of how I try to tell iTunes that it has to sort this one by album artist and not the artist, it never does.
I have tried at select all the 12 songs, get info. Write the same Albums Artist, the same Album Title and leave the Artist blank. And I choose sort by Album Artist and under option I choose part of a collection.
But this isn’t working for me, As soon I go back to my library, which sorted by Artist. The albums is still spread all over the place.
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Which in my opinion is the wrong and oldschool approach.

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But i don't really, keeping collections together didn't used to be a problem before. But i will keep trying some different things. But it's pretty annoying, that iTunes has such trouble with this.
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Regards
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Sorting: "Artist by Album" ??

Hi there, ...
I'm currently running iTunes using the CoverFlow view and the sorting "Album by Artist"! Now, when I quickly want to jump to another band using the keyboard letter (e.g. I want to jump to FOO FIGHTERS, so I hit the F to go near there) it does of course react wrong, as the "Album by Artist" sorting does jump to the next album starting with the letter F instead to the artist!
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Phew ... I hope somebody will get what I mean
Best, T.MOW

Hi!
I totally get what you mean, and I have EXACTLY the same problem! Please someone, is there a soulution? Or is the "Artist by Album"-feature planned for the next iTunes update?
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If you have songs not in iTunes that you want to add to iTunes in a different format than the song is in...
(This is carried over from at least 7.4)
Set the Importing prefs to what you want the new file to be.
Hold the Option key and go to menu Advanced and select *Convert selection to* AAC (or whatever is in the Import prefs}.
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Previously, you had to Import the file, change the prefs, go to Advanced - *Convert selection to*, convert the file, then delete the original from iTunes.
This is new...
In iTunes 8, go to to File - > *Show duplicates*. (moved from View menu).
Now hold Option and go to to File and it now displays *Show exact duplicates*.
Don't know what it means by *exact duplicate* though.

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Hi,
So I'm using iTunes 12, though this problem occurred with 11 too...
As you can see in the image, I'm using Mac DeMarco as an example, it happens with selected other artists too. I have two albums of his, yet they don't appear together and there are multiple instances of the artist. Even the albums don't appear together. Both of them have the same "Artist" and "Album Artist" information.
Here you can see one instance:
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What is going on? Please help.

Enable the Sort Artist and Sort Album Artist columns, chances are that the fields have been set inconsistently.
tt2

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Cpel1000 wrote:
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Hello,
I have a question regarding the sorting options in the iTunes Library. I have add a couple of albums which I have tagged accurately.
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See http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp
tt2

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How disappointing!

When sorting library as "Album by Artist," an album is out of order

This is really insignificant, I know, but it's bizarre, and I can't figure out why it's happening.
On one specific album, out of 1370, when I sort my library as Album by Artist or Album by Year, a single track is out of order. It is track 12, but appears at the end, after track 14. No matter what I put as the track number for that track, it will always be placed at the end of the album. It is not labeled as a different disc, album, or album artist, or as part of a compilation, nothing is misprinted, and near as I can tell, the track's info is completely consistent with the rest of the album. I even deleted all the track info for the whole album and manually filled it back in, and it still appears out of order. The tracks DO appear in the correct order when I only sort by album.
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Message was edited by: Rollersnake

OK, putting something in the Album Artist field for the album fixed it.
Near as I can tell, the track info for the album was inconsistent when I downloaded it, and though I deleted the "album artist" field for the whole album, more than once even, it somehow still registered as being different for that one track. Now when I delete the field for the whole album, it stays in order regardless of sorting method.

Artist vs Album Artist sort for Cover Scroll

I have a huge library of Cast/Soundtrack albums and have taken much time to sort each track by 1000's of artists. And then use new Album Artist to head each compliation as "Soundtrack" "Original Cast" et al... But for some reason certain discs are read in this new Album Artist while others either default to 1st Artist on Track 01 or default to end of Scroll under Various artists - despite my relabeling??? (even though new label does read on the new title)

sidssp is correct. This is how "Album Artist" is intended to be used. But there are two problems with this IMO:
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2. The iPod does not utilize "Album Artist" at all. If one utilizes the "Artist" field to reflect the main artist and featured artists as intended, then there is no way to quickly locate the main artist on an album, and then select all or individual albums by that artist. Which in my case effectively renders the new "Album Artist" field useless because there simply is no workaround.
OAW
PS: This is nearly as stupid as introducing playlist folders in iTunes and not having any sort of iPod support for the feature!

Sorting Individual Artists by Album by Year

I have a question about how to define how iTunes should sort songs. Currently, I use GRID VIEW to sort songs by artist, giving me the following view:
http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o151/AndrewG17/Picture2-2.png
Then I have the next section organized with GRID VIEW as well, giving me the following view:
http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o151/AndrewG17/Picture1-2.png
My question is when in this view, how do I tell iTunes to organize every one of these grids, which is the entire works of a particular artist, by ALBUM BY YEAR in an ascending fashion. You will notice that the second picture is organized in this fashion already, but if I were to return to the grid of artists and click on the same artist again it would revert to the following view:
http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o151/AndrewG17/Picture3-2.png
As you can see this is not the same view at all, and it is quite frustrating to CONSTANTLY have to tell iTunes to sort the artists by ALBUM BY YEAR. Is there someway I can have iTunes automatically define sorting in this way? Interesting enough not every artist will be sorted in the same fashion as this one (the third picture), indicating to me that there is some way to set the presets for sorting. However, in no case will the sorting technique that I indicate be "saved" for the next time I open that artist. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and thank you for your time.

Use the "Option" key when clicking on a sort button in grid view to get additional options.

Upgrade to 7.0.2 deletes artist name, Album sorting, importing files

Well, I use iTunes at work on a PC and it *****. I lost 90% of the artist name appearing in the Artist column. They show in Info for each song. How can I get them to show upm again. Also, on the PC version everytime I click Album it changes to Album by Artist, Album by Year, then to back to Album all of them in alphabetic descending order. I no longer can reverse the order. Finally, I have tried to import a few folders of music using the file method and itunes just links to the folder. None of this absurd behaviors happen on my macs nor do I ever want them to ever do it. Apple either send post a work around or upgrade and fix these annoying problems. These discussion threads are too bureacratic and time consuming to read.

These discussion threads are too bureacratic and time consuming to read.
Can't argue with you there, Stephen. I'm going to get the heck out of here ... ; - )
But before I do, I can address one of your issues.
Also, on the PC version everytime I click Album it changes to Album by Artist, Album by Year, then to back to Album all of them in alphabetic descending order. I no longer can reverse the order.
If you click on the words Album, Album by Artist, Album by Year, the column cycles through those headings but if you click on the actual arrow at the top, the heading remains the same and the arrow changes direction.

Sort album by artist or album by artist/year & compliations behavior

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