Sort Music-- Artist-- Albums-- All Songs where all songs are alpha order

I have quite a lot of songs on my iPod classic. For example I have 253 Beatles songs alone. When I go to Music-->artist-->songs they are all organized by Album. When I'm driving or even just sitting still this method of organization is just extremely inconvenient. I feel like it can't be that difficult to make it sort "all songs" by alphabetical order. Let me know if it is and if I'm just missing it...

The layout cannot be customised.
tt2

Similar Messages

Shell script to copy Music/Artists/Albums/Songs to Music2/Artists/Songs

Hi,
My Music folder is currently organized as follows (standard iTunes behaviour):
Music
Artists
Albums
Songs
Artist1
Album1
Song11
Song12
Song13
Album2
Song21
Song22
Artist2
Album1
Song11
Song12
Album2
Song21
Song22
Song23
etc.
I would like to copy this Music Folder to an USB flash drive, but without the "Albums" level, i.e.:
Music2
Artists
Songs
Artist1
Song11
Song12
Song13
Song21
Song22
Artist2
Song11
Song12
Song21
Song22
Song23
I assume that an unix shell script is able to do this, but this is beyond my skills
Or do you know a software that can manipulate files in such a way?
Thanks in advance.

OK, clear. For future runs, should I be better off runing the command in a directory on my Mac, and copy the resulting music folder to the USB drive?
No, the optimum solution would be to format the thumb drive with the HFS+ filesystem. You could use cp, ditto, or rsync will the proper options and not copy the file fork to the thumbdrive. Or you could filter out the file forks in the two find commands.
ls | while read dir; do
    find "${dir}" -type f ! -name "._*" $ -name "*.mp3" -o -name "*.m4a" $ -print0 | xargs -0 -I '{}' mv -n "{}" "${dir}"
done
find . -type f ! -name "._*" $ -name "*.mp3" -o -name "*.m4a" $ -mindepth 3 | while read file; do
     base=${file%\/*}
     base=${base##*\/}
     mv "${file}" "${file%*\/*\/*}"/"$base"_"${file##*\/}"
done
The warning or error messages are innocuous anyways.
OK. I removed them manually, which took me less than one minute. Should I add a "rm -r .DS_Store" step before future runs?
I wouldn't bother. Change->
find . -type d -empty -delete
to
find . -type d -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -exec rm -rf '{}' '+'

Sort by Artist - Album - Track Number

I could use some help pls. I have recently reinstalled and now all of a sudden iTunes is acting stupid. I want to sort by Artist -> Album -> Track Number. What is happening is it's sorting by Artist -> Album but the Track Numbers are backwards (listed 10 to 1).
Before you say it, it is NOT a tag issue!! I just spent the last two hours staring at a single album. Every instance of artist/album artist/disk x of y/year/genre/etc/etc are IDENTICAL. Every instance of everything that is not unique is absolutely identical!!
As a side note...does anyone know why Apple refuses to fix the bug in iTunes where mouse wheel scrolling has never worked?
Thanks...

Click on the Artist album header.
In the right side of the Artist album column header is a small triangle.
Click it so it points up. This will sort the albums track 1 thru track 10.
If the trianlge is pointing down, it will sort track 10 to track 1.
I click Artist with the arrow DEscending.
It's a triangle, not an arrow. The top of the triangle is smaller and the bottom is larger, just like the sort. Or vice-versa.
This used to automatically sort each Album under each Artist and within each Album the Tracks would be sorted numerically (1->10).
No, it has never worked as you suggest.
Ascending sort
Descending sort

Why does my new iPod touch sort music by album artist, instead of song artist?

I recently go an iPod touch 4th Gen. My old iPod sorted music by song artist, but the new one sorts it by album artist. My problem is this: There is an album called Re:generation. It was a project in which 5 DJs each made 2 songs for the album. So I enter the info for each song, but my iPod sorts it by album artist, which is listed as "Re:generation". I wanted the songs to be sorted by the 5 artists that actually made the songs, so there would be 2 songs under 5 different artists. If I wanted to listen to the whole album, I could press the album tab, scroll down to "Re:generation" and play the whole album. This all worked fine on my old iPod, but now it doesn't.
My first solution was to change the album artist on each song to the artist that created that song. But then by iPod list 5 different albums, so I can't listen to the album as a whole if I wanted to. My next solution was to erase the album artist info for each song, but now none of the ten songs can be found under the artist tab. I have to go over to the album and pick which song I want to hear.
If you don't understand, here's an example. 2 of the songs on the Re:generation album are by Pretty Lights. I want to be able to select Pretty Lights under the artist tab, choose all songs, shuffle, and have those 2 songs play at some point. But I would also like to be able to got to the album tag, select Re:generation, and play all 10 songs in order. However, the new setup won't allow me to do this.
So I'm wondering if I can fix the problem by somehow editing the iPod's sort settings (if possible), or reverting back to the old system (if possible), and why Apple even changed the system in the first place. It seems pretty stupid to me, and I honestly see no reason to change what I thought was a perfect system.

wow, i really don't have time to read all that, but i'll give you an hint when you're in music library click "More" and then "Composers" i think that's what you're lookin for otherwise just ignore it

Sorting music by "Album by Artist / Year" on iPod touch (3rd gen.)

Hello there,
In my music library, I have plenty of discographies per artist (eg. Bob Dylan's, Coldplay's etc...), and am finding a bit of a pain to sort it the way I want it on my iPod.
I've synced my new iPad with iTunes and copied all the music across, and when I look through the music on the iPad and select an artist, each of their albums are ordered by the year they were released in (and this happened automatically). I find this a much better way of sorting music to how I did it previously (i.e. each album ordered alphabetically).
Now, my question: How the heck do I get my iPod touch to do this?
On iTunes, I figured out you can sort the iTunes library in this way by selecting an artist in grid view, then clicking "Album by Title" above the column with album artwork and changing it to "Album by Artist / Year", however this only works for that specific artist's albums - to get your iTunes library to sort all albums this way you seemingly have to do this for each artist. Is there any way to make my whole library sort music this way without having to do that?
Essentially, how can I get my iPod to sort music the way my iPad does?
Thanks.

Hello,
As far as I can see, you can't sort the order of music on the iPod Touch. It is always sorted alphabetically.
Maybe you can suggest that as a feature to Apple.
~Lt. Leviathan

Artist Album info not showing some songs

I have a 30g fifth gen iPod, with about 4800 songs on it, running iTunes 6.0.5.20 on Windows XP SP2.
When I first got it, a lot of my files had bad data, so I cleared out all the info except for the Artist and Track, and then manually corrected all the data to make it work. What this means, is all of my songs previously didn't have any album info, and when I'd go to the Artists menu and select one, it would go to a list of albums where "All >" was the only option, and then that would display all of the songs for that artist.
Recently, I bought a few new CDs and I was ripping them to put them on my iPod, and now all the other songs that I had from those artists before won't show up under the Artist section, because it skips straight to the CD I put on rather than giving me a list of albums to choose from.
I know it's not a problem with my tags, because they all worked fine before I put these new albums on there.
Am I gonna be forced to include "dummy" album info in some songs?
Custom Windows XP

Right after I posted, I found another topic that basically answered my question.

Music artist/album not working

I have had this problem i cant seem to figure out since updating to ios 8. The problem seems only when 2 artist have the same album name. Example i have Outkast "Greatest Hits" and 2pac "Greatest Hits".
If i go to music > Artist > 2Pac > all the songs are fine
but,
If i go to music . Artist > OutKast > it shows the 2pac greatest hits
It does this with multiple artist, it shows someone else's music if they have the same album name.
I have made sure all the correct tags are entered into itunes and the album artist/artist are correct, also tried with album grouping on and off on my iphone 5s.
I cannot figure out what is causing the issue, but it worked great in ios 7 and with my past iphones.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

The key to using the Album Artist field is that it only works right if each song is also marked as belonging to a compilation. This choice has been moved to the Options tab in iTunes 8. +Album Artist+ should really by renamed +Compilation Artist+ to make its purpose clear.
Do four things for every track on a compilation album:
1. Fill in Album Artist exactly the same on every song, using an umbrella term like "Various Artists" or "Original Broadway Cast."
2. Make sure all songs have the same album title.
3. Make sure all songs have accurate "Disk __ of __" entries. If all songs are from one disk, it's easiest to erase the disk numbers. Alternately, you could put "1 of 1" in those boxes. Just don't have one song say "1 of 2" while another is blank.
4. For all songs, select Yes from the Compilation menu on the Options tab.

IPhone 4s sorting music by Album Artist? Applies to Compilations?

I was scrolling through my iPhone looking for a song, I saw an artist listed as "Hit Singles (1980-1990)". Clicking on it netted me a song by Genesis from their album of the same name. Which made me curious, so I scrolled again and found another "artist" that was, in fact, the name of the album in question. A Jackson 5 track that I've not been able to find on my iPhone is listed in iTunes as by the Jackson 5 with the Album Artist of "Various Artists"
So I'm mucking about in iTunes and finding that this applies to a lot of compilations and trying to correct some of this nets me an artists listing that seems to willfully skip over the artists on those compilations. As in (and this is a crappy example):
Beach Boys
Beastie Boys
Various Artists [being a Beastie Boys song on a soundtrack]
Beatles.
And choosing Various Artists gets me a list of all the compilations on my iPhone, which is... awkward at best, frustrating at worst. I've never had this problem on any other iPod. What's going on and how can I fix this apart from trying to correct a metric ton of incomplete data acquired over the past several years?

Hello,
As far as I can see, you can't sort the order of music on the iPod Touch. It is always sorted alphabetically.
Maybe you can suggest that as a feature to Apple.
~Lt. Leviathan

Sorting Music by Album in iPod on iPad

In the iPod app on iPad, really the only way I want to organise my music is by Album.
But I have several albums containing tracks by various artists, and instead of just showing 1 Album cover representing that Album, the iPod app shows an album cover for every song on the album...
Surely there is a way to sort Albums by Album alone, and not by Album+Artist combined?
For example, I have a mixer album that was originally on 3 CDs, and I would be happy for 3 entries to be displayed representing CD1, CD2, and CD3; And the mp3 tags are all correctly set for the albums to be displayed this way...
But iPod insists on showing me roughly 60 album entries instead of 3 - one for every single song.
This is really quite irritating.
I have worked out that I COULD change the mp3 tags to remove the artist information (and incorporate it into the song title), but this would be a time consuming corruption of correct tags to work around a bizarre behaviour of iPod.
Am I missing a setting in iPod, or in iTunes before syncing to the iPad?

Is it showing up OK in iTunes?
I have an album featuring various artists on my iPad and it shows up fine. I do find that these can be a bit of a problem though, as iTunes and iPods do have a tendency to try to split them up if everything is not just right.
Check what the album artist is set to in iTunes. I have found that a solution to this problem is to allocate a dummy album artist to all the tracks (I usually use "zzz" as this means the album will be easy to find at the bottom if you have sorted the albums by artist, but anything will do). Then, select all the tracks in the album and delete that album artist, so it is blank. Once this is done, the albums usually sit OK as compilations in my iTunes and iPod/iPad.
Not sure whether that makes sense, or if it will work for you, but it may be worth trying.

Unable to sort music in albums

Recently I had a computer crash and I'm having to rebuild my Itunes library on a new PC running Windows 7 64 bit.
When I re-detected all my music it's absolutely all over the place and half of it won't allow me to sort it.
I know how to rename the album and artist fields in order to combine songs into one album, but some songs have the fields grayed out and won't allow changes, and other songs seem to allow me to make the changes but then don't keep those settings after I click ok. This is really driving me insane. I hate Itunes. Why can't they just do drag and drop like everyone else? Or better yet, reverse sync my phone to rebuild itunes instead of erasing my phone. HATE. ITUNES.
I'm running 11.1.5.5. I'm afraid to run the latest update.. never know what else will be screwed up.
Does anyone have any solutions to this?
Thanks in advance,
Samantha

Do you still have the greyed out fields issue? The permissions tip should be a complete fix for that.
Changes that revert themselves with mp3 files might be down to multiple tags.
Multiple tags
The ID3 specification allow files to have multiple tags in different versions and languages, but iTunes only works properly with single tags. When multiple tags are present it can sometimes fail to apply updates to the tag that it reads back (presumably updating one of the others in the file) and it is also possible that iPod & iTunes may have different rules for which tag they give priority to. This could lead to situations in which everything is properly organised in iTunes but then inexplicably falls apart on an iPod. There are 3rd party tag editors that can manipulate multiple tags but I don't have a recommendation offhand. A workaround in iTunes is to use right-click context menu Convert ID3 Tags... > None a few times to remove all existing tags and then Convert ID3 Tags... > v2.3 to build a fresh tag with the information still held in the iTunes database. I've read in the past that iTunes isn't fully compliant with the v2.4 spec. although this may no longer be the case, however support for v2.3 is widespread so I would suggest using v2.3 over v2.4.
iTunes Store metadata
If you notice that changes you've made to purchased tracks revert to the original iTunes Store metadata then...
In iTunes go to Edit > Preferences > Store and turn off
Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases
Share details about your library with Apple
On any iOS device go to Settings > Music and turn off
Show All Music
Close and reopen iTunes and/or reset the device and you should see your version of the metadata for each track rather than the original store data.
See also Getting iTunes & Windows Media Player to play nicely just in case WMP is involved, though that is usually a one time problem.
And see Grouping tracks into albums for advice on the organizing the library once your changes will stick.
tt2

Is there a way to sort music in itunes by which ID the song was purchased under?

We have a shared family library that has built up over time using a variety of apple ids. I'd like to be able to easily see all those that were used.

Thanks Michael... your reply/suggestion is most helpful. I have purchased a lot of songs/albums today from iTunes and wanted to add them to my custom playlists. This will help me identify the purchased songs easily. Cheers!

ITunes opens as if it erased all data whereas all still stored in lib

Hi there,
when I open iTunes (7.01), all is blank (no more music, settings, podcasts, purchases) as if I just downloaded it.
However,all data (music/video/podcasts) still exist in
c:/Documents.../my music...iTunes.
When I try to sync my iPod, iTunes says that my iPOd is linked to another library.
Except from importing song by song in iTunes, how can I reconnect to the relevant original library?
BR

hi
This is an amateur solution, but I am an amateur, and
I may have justed created doubles of my entire
library, but it seems to have solved the problem that
several people, including me, have mentioned in the
last few days on this forum.
In i-Tunes go into the Edit menu, then Preferences
and then Advanced. Check the i-tunes music library
location in that window. Remember it or write it
down.
Now close all that and open the File menu. Click on
Add folder to library and then browse to the i-tunes
library folder you have just located. This will then
take a few seconds to refill your library. Panic
over! I think!
btw I called an Apple helpdesk about this and they
said they’d never heard of the problem, nor did they
have any solution for it.
hope it works for you
andy
Andy,
thanks for the tip!
It worked well.
Only drawback is I have to re-insert my old columns, but I can live with that.
Best regards!

I want to sync my 2nd generation ipod touch a new laptop with the updated version of itunes but i do not want to lose all of my songs on the ipod. i have backed it up but cannot find where all of the backed up data goes. can you tell me where to find it?

i would like to sync my second generation ipod touch to a new laptop with the recently updated version of itunes. in order to do this, it deletes all the music of the ipod. i would like to be able to save my music as i have spent alot of money purchases it. i have backed up the ipod in order not to loose any of the music but i cannot find where the songs are backed up to? can you please help me find where the songs have been backed up to so i can save them please

See:
Syncing to a "New" Computer or replacing a "crashed" Hard Drive: Apple Support Communities
The iPod backup that iTunes makes does not include synced media like apps and music.

Hello. Today I downloaded then transferred some songs from a YouTube converter to my desktop then into my iTunes Music. I then synced my iPod Touch to get them on my iPod now all of my other songs are gone! How do I get them back?!

Hello. Today I downloaded some songs from a YouTube converter. I selected the songs I wanted and tranferred them from my desktop into iTunes. I clicked on "Music", which I believe is where ALL of my other songs that I already had on my iPod, should be. But they're not. They're all gone! I tried logging out and searching my original songs I had in the search box, but nothing shows up. Only the songs I had transferred from the YouTube converter are displayed in my iTunes music, and I don't know how to get them back. I also tried syncing and restoring my iPod back from iTunes Backup but that didn't work, either. I don't know what to do! Please help!!

When you do a sync iTunes will only transfer the music you have selected. So you want to make sure that you select every song to sync.

ITunes 11 [Songs view] - Sort on artist, then year

I just downloaded iTunes 11 and there seem to be some features missing compared to iTunes 10. One of the most important issues is that in the "Songs" view, I cannot seem to sort on (1) Artist and (2) Album year. It seems that iTunes is automatically sorting as (1) Artist, (2) Album name alphabetically. For example, for Norah Jones, first the album Little Broken Hearts (2012) is displayed, and after that the album Not Too Late (2007). Does anyone know if this can still be done in iTunes 11 or is the feature missing completely? Interestingly enough, in the "Albums" view, there is an option to sort by Artist, then Year (view --> view options).
Another issue, which I believe has been adressed in other topics as well, is the complete missing of albumart in the "Songs" view. Consequently, this was also the place in iTunes 10 where you could choose to sort on Arist/Year. I really hope that Apple puts this feature back in iTunes 11 as soon as possible.

Yep, I'm seeing the same thing. Just downloaded iTunes 11 and now I can't sort albums by year in the "Artists" view. I used to prefix all my album mp3 tag names with the year number to work around this, but removed it when Apple added the Artist/Year sort. Now it's gone. Yay!
A note: you can use the free mp3tag.de software to insert your year tag into your album titles using regular expressions. If there doesn't seem to be any obvious solution to sorting by Artist/Album/Year in the next couple days, then I'll post here with some tips if anyone is interested.

Sort Music-- Artist-- Albums-- All Songs where all songs are alpha order

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for