Bug in iTunes numeric title sort.

Question

The Bug in the sort-function of the iPod results in mixed up track list.
An album with more then 9 tracks will be sorted in the wrong way, when only title or filename or the album field is just to give a track a number. The play order is 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 2, 3 , 4 , 5, 6.... instead of the correct order 1,2,3,4,5,6...10,11, 12...
(Same issue with album numbers in Compliations. CD1, CD10, CD11, CD12, CD2, CD3....)
For example: After playing the track named "The Beatles - Yellow Submarine - 1 - Yellow Submarine" the ipod/iTunes will play "The Beatles - Yellow Submarine - 10 - Baby, You´re A Rich Man" instead of "The Beatles - Yellow Submarine - 2 - Hey Bulldog."
The programmer have to search the string for numbers and join all numeric values to a single number.
Example: Sample data :abc123. is "a" a number? no. is "b" a number no. is "c" a number no. is "1" a number? yes. store. is "2" a number? yes. join to "1". (now we have "12"). is "3" a number? yes. join to "12". (Now we have "123") -> EOL
Is "123" larger than "99"? yes! is "123" larger than 124. no!
Thats it. In perl you need 1 line of sourcecode, in c and c++ this can be done in 10 lines. In java there a objects for this type of work.
And every user will be happy and nobody has to do the 01, 02, 03 workaround or reimport their audiobooks.
(I guess its easy and dn´t need much more performance... iTunes uses enough ram to extra cache this operation.)
Alternativly Apple should thing about storing the original filename in the ID3 tag or itunes database. This would make sorting the files without id3 tags (believe me or not, there are many people using mp3 for 10 years and have no id3 tags in there mp3-library) in itunes possible. (there is a god free tagger for mac os but no for windows.)
A company like Apple should have the ability to correct the error / bug in the iPod-firmware (have the same issue in classic and iphone) or itunes-softwar.
This is a wellknown and very common error done by newbie programmers or people who have not read the documentation of the software-libraries.

Answer 1

Whether you like the idea or not, the appropriate place to to incorporate information about the contents of media files is inside the tag, not the filename. Modern media software is generally designed to extract and use this information. As you have indicated users are free to choose their own filename conventions which often cannot be correctly interpreted by software. iTunes & iPod can provide you with many more ways to organise & select your music with the correct information than will be the case if, as you seem to imply, the only field present is the Name which iTunes will take from the filename if it can't find a tag.
Assuming you've been consistent with your naming scheme a small investment of time with a tagging program could populate the ID3 tags by parsing the different sections of the name into the appropriate fields. Magic File Renamer, The Rename and similar programs can even be used just to add the leading zeros to the track number section of the filenames if you really want to hold out against adding tags. If you use a 3rd party tagger you need to force iTunes to rescan the information thus: CTRL-A (select all), CTRL-I (get info.), click OK (read the tag & update with any changes - you didn't make any before you clicked OK did you? - and update the iTunes database with the current info.) If you move or rename files outside of iTunes you can either manually remove & reimport files or use one of the tools I suggest below.
A year ago I spent some time preparing a list of over 50 ideas for improving iTunes & iPod all of which I consider would be easy to program and would make the products nicer to use. The reality is that Apple is a large and mostly deaf corporation. I've sent my ideas to iTunes Feedback & iPod Feedback but who knows if anyone who could influnce future development ever got to see them. What is clear is that new features are generally only introduced on new models. Rather than railing that it could be better (granted) it is much more productive to gain an understanding of the way that the software works and try to accomodate for it. See, for example, my postings on Grouping tracks into albums or Find tracks without artwork where I've shared my experience on how to get all my albums organised neatly & consistently. As I mentioned elsewhere I have an iRiver and while trawling a folder structure to locate music works I'm much happier with my instant-on, fully organised & artworked iPod where I can see artwork as I'm selecting music, play videos & games and store so much more.
tt2
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*Adding new items/removing orphans*
Try iTunes Folder Watch or iTunes Library Updater. Folder Watch is much faster on the adding files front, can be set to run in the background and includes a useful exclusion feature, however it’s really slow at removing orphans. iTLU is better for this although doing it manually after looking at a list of proposed removals generated by Folder Watch is probably faster still. iTLU can also be set to update iTunes when you've used 3rd party tools to change tag info.