Itunes 7.1 sorting problems

Question

I downloaded itunes 7.1 on my macbook pro and mac mini and it works fine except my shows are not organised by way of the episode number. They are sorted randomly like the 22nd one is first and the 1st one is somewhere in the middle. The tab is sorted using show but does not work. Even tried other options but no channge

Answer 1

According to the ID3v2.4 spec (which iTunes does a fairly decent job of respecting, especially compared with other media players), the "Album Artist" field is only valid if the "Artist" field is also set; i.e. you can't have a track with no artist that is part of an album that does have an artist associated with it. Basically, don't set "Album Artist" without "Artist," as it will be ignored. It looks like this logic extends to the "Sort" metatags that Apple added for this release of iTunes, so the value of "Sort Album Artist" is ignored unless "Sort Artist" is also specified. It's quirky, though, since it looks like iTunes will let you get away with tagging files with "Album Artist" but not "Artist"; I think it just automatically sets the two fields to the same value if "Artist" is not specified.