Sometimes when I play songs in Itunes by double clicking on them, Itunes will place the song as the first one on the album. It will chnage the order of the songs on the album, and I can not switch them back to the correct order.

Question

Sometimes when I play songs in Itunes by double clicking on them, Itunes will place the song as the first one on the album.  It will chnage the order of the songs on the album, and I can not switch them back to the correct order.  This onloy seems to happen when I double-click on the song to play it in itunes.  If I just hit play, this doesnt happen.  As a result, I have several albums now in which the songs are in the wrong order.  Its very frustrating, as this error then transfers over to my ipod every time I sync it.  When I choose the info. for the songs, it has them correctly listed (i.e., it lists the songs as being #1 of 19 on the CD, for example).  But then the song will have placed by Itunes as #5 of 19 for whatever reason.  Itunes does not do this every time, but does it with enough frequency to be maddening.  Any thoughts?

Answer 1

The problem of tracks becoming de-linked between iTunes and the music files in your iTunes music folder happens for different reasons - this seems to come up fairly commonly in this forum.
The solution can be to locate each song in the iTunes library, as you mentioned - or, but wait, before I get to that...
trouble finding the original track in your iTunes music folder? maybe look for it under compilations, or if not using the 'group compilations preference' then look in the folder under the songs artist name, but what song artist name iTunes uses depends on what you have in the metedata tag spot for album artist or song artist. Any varyation in artist name spelling, in the menu item 'get info' metadata for any selected individual track will cause iTunes to create that as a separate artist folder in the library, even names like 'various' or any difference at all (even the word 'the' can change where in your iTunes music folder a track gets placed by iTunes). You can try to use the finder function of find file (finder munu item outside of iTunes) to locate hard to find items.
Back to how to re-link any de-linked tracks .
There may be scripts that can help re-link de-linked music files - or, at least provide you a list of such files, Scripts are easy to install and use...
at Dougs Scripts, there is one called iTunes Track CPR that might work
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=itunestrackcpr
or, if you just want a list of de-linked tracks, go to
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
and find the script called List MIA's, this will create a text file listing all de-linked tracks
if you review the thread at
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3633708
also the thread at
https://discussions.apple.com/message/17513078#17513078
you may find more insight into dealing with this kind of issue there, although some of that thread may not apply to your case, aspects of it might help.
Good luck.