Sorting Audiobooks in iTunes

Question

Here's my problem, this weekend I spent most of it ripping and tagging the 7 Harry Potter audiobooks into my library because I am planning a road trip and it’s a lot easier for the books to be played off the iPhone that keep switching the CDs in the car. Anyway I am a little OCD when it comes to organization and stuff. I have all my music organized by author and then year in iTunes and in the grid view and I want all the audiobooks to be in the same order. Here’s the problem first of all when right click on the header and hit sort by author, I can’t hit “within author, by years” because it is grayed out. How do I get it un grayed out so I can click on it? Secondly because as of right now I only have 1 series of audiobooks (I’m planning on ripping 2 more from CDs later) I simply sort them by year instead of by author and then year. However even with the year field all properly labeled, they don’t sort by year! This is only in grid view. Any help?

Answer 1

As ed2345 says, for Paul McCartney, the way to control the sort order is to use the sort fields. Find a Paul McCartney track, preferably one he has a sole composer credit on, and "Get Info.". On the sorting tab put "McCartney, Paul" into the *Sort Artist*, *Sort Album Artist* and *Sort Composer* (if applicable) fields. Click OK, now right/option/cmd-(whatever works)-click and click on *Apply Sort Field > All Matching Fields*. Repeat for each solo Artist as desired. This has to be done manually as iTunes can't hold a comprehensive directory of all artists and their "correct" sort position. In any case, sometimes people have different views on what is correct.
Again, *Album by Year* should do what you want in iTunes unless there are two albums by the same artist where the chronological order is different from the alphabetical order. Even if you put the full release date into the tag via a 3rd party tool iTunes only works with the Year value. Sorting on iPod/iPhone is always alphabetical.
tt2