Sorting Albums by Band / Year

I went through my collection and tagged everything the way I want, and it's all mostly fine, except..
I sort by The "Artist/Year" column. It works fine for the way I want to see my materials, except when a band has more than one release in the same year. They're not always in the proper order. It appears to use alphabetical for a third condition. What I'm wondering is there a way around that?
The example that made me notice it is Deep Purple. Their first two albums were both released in 1968. The first one being "Shades of Deep Purple", and the second being "The Book of Taliesyn". They were both out in 1968, but it lists Taliesyn first, presumably because it's sorting off of "Book" which comes before "Shades".
Is there any way to further refine release info with something that will let me put that the way I want? I realize I'm probably just going to have to live with it, but I was wondering if there was anything in the current infrastructure that would allow for circumstances like this?

Similar Messages

ITunes sort 'Album by artist/year' problems

I've been having problems sorting _some_ albums. I'll give you a specific example:
I rip Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Concert in Central Park' which has 19 tracks. I want them to play in continuous mode, and in order.
I show track number in the columns, make sure all the tracks are of the same album and artist and I don't specify and sort options.
Now I click on the column header 'Album by Artist/Year' and I see that track 16 is first followed by 18, 19 then 1,2,3, etc.
I'm not sure why 16,18 and 19 are out of order, but they are and I don't know what other field it is using to apply this sort order since I've turned off the sort fields. I should say that I think the sort fields are turned off since I selected all tracks, hit command-I and made sure that the artist and album are the same, then went over to the sorting tab and selected each checkbox and made sure that the field was blank. Clicked on OK, then went into each track one at a time and verified that the general info and sort info were as I specified.
If I change the sort column to be just 'Album' then it sorts correctly - I think that the year is messed up, so I add the year column to the display and see that it is 1982. I click on the year and the sort is just fine. I set it back to 'Album by Artist/Year' and the same bizzare sort shows up. The same mis-sort shows with 'Album by Artist' so I do a check on the artist name (even looking for leading or trailing spaces - nothing).
I could probably delete the album and re-rip it, but I would rather find out why the sort is messed up so I can correct this problem if/when it shows up again. I'm aware that I have a few other albums with similar problems.
Thanks,
-Mark

Reply to my own question.
In the sidebar a similar question was asked (if I could learn how to post the right question in the first place I probably would have found it).
I reset the disc number then the tracks showed up in the correct sort order. I'm pretty sure that the tracks had disc number 1 of 1 before, now they just have _ of _ (blank of blank).

How can I sort "Album by Artist / Year" in new iTunes 11?

Hi all! I just can't find such option in new iTunes!
Can I sort my music like in old iTunes by Artist/Year?

When I sort like that in th genre menu albums go by artist or by year only. I just wanna old method by artist/year like in itunes 10.

Sort Album by Artist/Year Not Working Correctly

For the Beatles, I have bought 3 albums from iTunes - Please Please Me, With the Beatles and Magical Mystery Tour. For some reason, using the above sorting Magical Mystery Tour appears at the top of the list, despite the fact that the year field is correctly entered for all 3. There is no info in the 'Sort Year' field either. I have quite a good understanding of how the iTunes library works, but this has me baffled (and annoyed)

dannycorker wrote:
It appears they are, although I refuse to believe this is the accepted behaviour - has no one else complained about this?
It could simply be a weakness is the way this was all designed. If you look at the information Gracenote uses, it's not unusual for all tracks on a 60's compilation album to be incorrectly listed as the same year, often the year the compilation was released. The same thing tends to happen with re-issued albums. That's down to whoever inputs the information into Gracenote for that album, often a bored record company employee.
First of all, you could try changing the year for each documentary to the year the album was produced and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, then you have to decide how to handle it.
Accept it as it is.
Change the year for the documentary to the same year as the album and simply kid yourself that it's the correct year. (I'm not being flippant, but if the documentary is all footage from album release year, then "technically", the doumentary is from that 60's year.)
Leave the year of the documentary track blank, but put the year (2010) into the track's "Comments" field instead.
Propose a workable solution to Apple via Apple Feedback. (I am being a bit flippant now. Sorry, but you'll be in for a long wait before anything might change.)
Get Gracenote to change their text fields, get the people who input the information into Gracenote to do so correctly and then get Apple to change iTunes to recognise those changes. (Now I am being very flippant. Good luck with this one!) Oh! And hope Apple never decide to change from Gracenote to someone else!
Number 2 or 3 are probably your best bet.

Sort albums by descending year - itunes unable to play album

I prefer my albums to be displayed in itunes with the latest albums first. So I use grid view albums and set 'sort by' to 'descending'.
When i select an album to play it will play the first track but the track numbers are ALSO in descending order and when clicking next it doesn't play the next track. If I go into the album and click next, the album ends because it thinks the first track of the album is the last.
This is because the track numberings are also in descending order.
Why would itunes do this? Why are not these functions mutually exclusive?
This is a major ridiculous flaw in itunes that doens't allow you to play your latest albums in order.
You are forced to have your 1967 classical album at the top of your itunes if you want to play your albums with the track numbers in order and all your latest albums down the bottom.
I'm sure this has been posted before, but any comments, suggestions, feedback from apple themselves, about this problem appreciated.

seems this is a problem people have complained about for years without any resolve to it. Unbelievable. 2012 and you can't play your latest albums in itunes, hah, what a joke
https://discussions.apple.com/message/8704619#8704619
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16011116#16011116
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16377367#16377367

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

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

Sort order when using "Album by Artist/Year" album list view

In iTunes 10, I seem to have lost the sorting I've been using for the past 5 years at least. I use the "Album List" view, and have the album artwork showing to the left of the songs. I see the new "Album by Artist/Year" sort option in the album artwork column, and that is how I would like it to sort. However, now the album are arranged by artist, and within the artist by the year they were released as tagged in the info for each song. I want the newest albums at the top, and I cannot figure out how to make it sort that way. What do I need to do? Basically I want it in descending order by release date, but still sorted by album.

dannycorker wrote:
It appears they are, although I refuse to believe this is the accepted behaviour - has no one else complained about this?
It could simply be a weakness is the way this was all designed. If you look at the information Gracenote uses, it's not unusual for all tracks on a 60's compilation album to be incorrectly listed as the same year, often the year the compilation was released. The same thing tends to happen with re-issued albums. That's down to whoever inputs the information into Gracenote for that album, often a bored record company employee.
First of all, you could try changing the year for each documentary to the year the album was produced and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, then you have to decide how to handle it.
Accept it as it is.
Change the year for the documentary to the same year as the album and simply kid yourself that it's the correct year. (I'm not being flippant, but if the documentary is all footage from album release year, then "technically", the doumentary is from that 60's year.)
Leave the year of the documentary track blank, but put the year (2010) into the track's "Comments" field instead.
Propose a workable solution to Apple via Apple Feedback. (I am being a bit flippant now. Sorry, but you'll be in for a long wait before anything might change.)
Get Gracenote to change their text fields, get the people who input the information into Gracenote to do so correctly and then get Apple to change iTunes to recognise those changes. (Now I am being very flippant. Good luck with this one!) Oh! And hope Apple never decide to change from Gracenote to someone else!
Number 2 or 3 are probably your best bet.

Sorting albums a-z, not by year..

no idea when this started to happen, can't have been long ago, but iTunes (7.5 (19)) is now organizing my library albums by their year, and I really don't want this!! I want to list my albums a-z! I can't find where I can switch this off. I ctrl-click on the title bar, and 'Album' is checked. So I uncheck it and the 'Album by Year' (AbY) goes away. great. But then there's no album sort. So I ctrl-click the title bar again and select 'Album, and I get AbY again! grrrrrr.. how can I make it sort JUST BY ALBUM?!?!?!

GAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
didn't even know i/it did that!!!
i feel so frikken stupid.
Thanks John
you know, there's no mention in any help topics about this
Message was edited by: Kit Greer

Sorting Albums by Year

When sorting albums by year, albums with the oldest title go first. That's ridiculous because an album never could have been released before the latest title has been released. Sorting albums by the latest title track would make more sense...

I think the distinction is about which "year" is used to sort compilations/anthologies when different tracks have different dates. I suspect iTunes uses the year of the first track of the album rather than the latest value across all tracks which might make better sense. iTunes supports only the single year value rather than extended year & time (date) for the original recording & the release in question. Including these would enable iTunes to sort correctly when an artist releases more than one album in the same year.
tt2

Sorting albums by year doesn't work properly in new iTunes 11.

Sorting albums by year doesn't work properly in new iTunes 11.
See the screenshots below.
There's a kind of albums. Double CD in one set. Queen "The Works" 1984, for example.
First CD is the original release and the second one is bonus CD for the original album's reissue in 2011.
iTunes 10 took year info from track 1 of CD1 for "sort album by year" function.
But new iTunes 11 takes the highest value of year in the album's track list.
Same things with additional bonus tracks for the album's reissues.
See the screenshot of Madonna "Like a Virgin" 1984 album.
So my collection is in a huge mess after last update to iTunes 11.
It's a big problem. And must be solved to the next update.

I noticed this too, and I think it gets even more complicated when you think about the difference between how you want Re-releases to be ordered: based upon the intial release year (like you have described above), and Compilations or Greatest Hits: where you want them to be sorted by when the albums were actually released. iTunes 11 seems to just grab the date of the most recently released song on an album. This worked fine for 2/3 of my Compilation albums, because they just happened to be released the same year as the latest song on each album.
Compilation example (released: 2003, latest song on album: 1969):
This is what I submitted to Apple as feedback:
This issue is actually aimed at iTunes 11, but 10.6.3 is the most recent version number I could select in the drop-down menu.
As with normal albums, iTunes 11 puts a release year next to "Various Artists" in Albums > Expanded View (and also in the Songs and Genre Tabs). However, iTunes seems to produce this number by looking for the last released song on the album. This has worked fine for 2/3 of my compilations, but the third one is a 60s compilation released in 2003. It displays "1969" next to "Various Artists" and there are no tags available in Get Info to change this. This also happens to greatest hits collections.
When selecting View > View Options > "Artist" then "Year" in Album view, and View > View Options > "Year" in Artist and Genre view, the above issue causes compilations, greatest hits collections, and re-releases (Although users may want re-releases to be listed in order of original release) to be sorted in the wrong order.
Considering iTunes 11 has added this feature (in previous iTunes versions, "Year" would only appear next to individual tracks), it is a shame an "Album Year" or "Sort Album Year" hasn't been added to the Get Info options.
As is, the only solution I can think of is to change all track years to the release year of the album.
I imagine this might be a bit of an edge case, and not something the majority of iTunes users would care about, but then again, I could imagine a fair number of musicphiles wanting control over this metadata.
Message was edited by: folo1988, info added.

Sorting songs by 'Album by Artist/Year' bug in iTunes 9.0

As the title suggests, there is a massive bug in the new iTunes when sorting songs by 'Album by Artist/Year.'
Pretty much, it is not separating different discs from the same album. In a 2 disc CD, it goes like this:
Disc 1, Track 1
Disc 2, Track 1
Disc 1, Track 2
Disc 2, Track 2
It is extremely annoying, a major oversight from Apple.
I have attached a screenshot: http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/3134/itunesbug.jpg

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

The new update limits album sorts to album by artist year and is too limiting. How do I get the standard sort by album alone

The new update limits album sorts to album by artist year and is too limiting. How do I get the standard sort by album alone?

Click the heading of the Album column to cycle between Album, Album by Artist and Album By Artist/Year.
tt2

How can I sort albums in a genre by release date in the itunes store

How can I sort albums in a genre by release date in the itunes store

Did you figure this out? Am having the same problem.
EDIT:
Found the group in store (in this case Juana Molina) It said music -> alternative
Changed to column view, and could not find the artist at all in any of the sub categories.
iTunes is really the biggest pain in the .... and has gotten worse over the years.

How can I sort albums by album artist while keeping compilations together?

Argh, I'm getting a bit exasperated. Basically I just want to be able to scroll through cover flow and see all my albums with one cover representing each album, with all the compilations near the end under "V" for various. Surely most people would want to scroll through their albums in this way??
So I've gone through and added all the album artist info, which has worked fine for the artist albums. But for all the "Various" ones, instead of doing the logical thing and grouping them together by album, iTunes orders these all by track artist. There doesn't seem to be any secondary sort function..
I'm always defending Mac and Apple products for their logical applications and ease of use, and now I feel let down.. If there's a way around this please let me know! Thanks,
Malinna

The trouble you're encountering is that iTunes sorts first by Album Artist, then by Artist. Thus, within each Album Artist, you'll get multiple Artist clumps.
You want to sort "Album by Artist". This will, first, strip out all your compilations and sort them to the end of your library, then sort using the hierarchy Album Artist (or Artist if there is none) > Album > Disc # > Track #. Click the Album column header until Album by Artist is displayed. (You can also choose Album by Year, which will sort albums chronologically within Album Artist.)
If you want to keep albums together, you'll need to sort on an Album column; other columns are bound to clump things by whatever you're sorting on.

Sorting Albums by Band / Year

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