Track order issues

I'm having this trouble with itunes and track orders:
Lately all cds that I've added to my collection got the wrong track order, the last song showing right after the first. I'm pretty sure all tracks share the same metadata for artist, album artist, album, etc.
So for this CD with 8 tracks the order itunes shows is 1-8-2-3-4-5-6-7. Same for two cds with 10 tracks (1-10-2-3..). I tried changing the artist/album info for the misplaced track but it always goes back to the wrong order when I fix it.
And oddly this only happens when I sort by album by artist. The order is correct when I sort by album only.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Buck Banzai wrote:
on the iPod: there's an album that appears 3 times on iPod with exactly the same songs while in itunes it's fine! what the **** is this? Can anyone help me?
Likely you just need to do a restore on the iPod, let it format and resync and it should be fine.
Buck Banzai wrote:
since i have a 8Gb iPod nano 3G and a 20Gb AND I would like to use the automatic Sync with the iPod i created a new library in iTunes where i'll have only 8Gb of stuff. Seems like a good idea to just plug the iPod and it syncs automatically with the stuff I've already chosen,
No that is a fairly inefficient way to do it. iTunes can tell your iPods apart, so all you have to do is sync them to the same library and for the Nano, set it up to sync a playlist of what you want.
Instead of creating a whole new library, just create a playlist in iTunes with that same set of music in it. Not only will you only have one library, but you can now easily add things or delete thing from that playlist out of your main library.
Then plug in the Nano and set it up to sync only that playlist. Simple!
Buck Banzai wrote:
Just another thing... can any of you advise me on a good auto-MP3 tagger application (for free!)?? I had a really good one for WinXP - Magic MP3 Tagger - but it's not available for Mac and i think it would resolve the track ordering issues!
iTunes is free and is a pretty good MP3 tagger.
Patrick

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Fix track order on itunes 11

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This excellent article from turingtest may help you.
http://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp

Creative MP3 player plays songs alphabetically instead of in track order

I use a Creative Nomad Zen 20GB USB 2.0 MP3 player with iTunes 7. Lately, songs listed in the correct track order on a given album in iTunes show up listed and get played in alphabetical order when copied to the Zen.
Any way in iTunes around this? I've been using XNJB, but it seems like it should be do-able in iTunes - especially since I wasn't having this problem in previous versions.
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Organising by date added in track order

hi.
i have my itunes organised by date added so i can see whats newest in my library.
the only issue is that it doesnt list the tracks in the right order in the album and sometimes splits each album into smaller batches of tracks.
is there a solution to this?
thanks

There is no general solution for what you want, but if you sort your CDs in reverse track order before you rip them it should work as you want. For multi-disc albums, rip the last disc first. When purchasing albums from iTunes pause the downloads and then download the tracks one by one in reverse order. If importing content from your hard drive then these can also be dragged in one at a time (must be at least one second apart) in reverse track order.
The above assumes you want the most recently added album sorted at the top, with its tracks in a natural playback order.
tt2

Track order of my album out of order

Hello,
I am having issues with my song order on my itunes.
Usually when I put my songs of a certain album in my itunes and click the album tab at the top the songs are in order by track number in my album, but for one of my albums its in a completely messed up order and I can't figure out why.
What I have tried so far:
-I used the "get info" and made sure that the track number is there in order (1-20) for each song.
-For the track number I also tried listing it as 1 of 20, 2 of 20, 3 of 20...etc but it has no effect.
-I used "get info" and tried typing 1 of 1 for the disc number for each song in my album but it did nothing so I changed it back to what it was, (it doesn't say anything)
-I even renamed my songs starting with a 1-20 corresponding to its track number, nothing changed.
-I even did this to the song files on my computer with windows media player so the files themselves have the correct track number and numbering in song name, I used the "Advanced tag editor" on WMP.
- I sync songs manually by dragging the songs into my "music" under my ipod, not my itunes library, this always worked except for this album, I tried syncing my songs about 5 or so times
-I use a windows XP 2005 edition and the new nano ipod
Other info:
-The album name is the same for each song, so all the songs are in the same album.
-It is set to album, not album by year or artist or anything else.
-It is not on shuffle, the order is physically out of order so when i play it on "play once" or similar it's suppose to go on to the next song in that track order but since it's in a messed up order it plays in that messed up order where normally on a normal un-messed up order album it would play the next track number in order since it is in order on my itunes.
Other info 2:
-I do not want to make a playlist, I want the album in order on my itunes so when I'm using my ipod I can just go that album and play the songs according to track number.
-The reason why I want it into order a lot is because this album is a "gapless megamix" which means when the songs transaction into the next song is unnoticeable since the song transact into the next song without pausing, so basically it is like one big, one hour song when actually composed of 20 songs, so the album must be in order.
So in a nut shell I just want my album's songs to be in track order.
Thanks

Sorry for double posting but I wanted this to be in a different post
Ok, after hours and hours of hurting my head I found the solution to this.
The problem is that in the "sort" tab under the "get info" section is that there are 2 sections for artists, one is just "artist" and the other is "album artist."
When you erase the "album artist" the track number reorders itself correctly, so I just needed to leave "artist" and delete the "album artist."
Now my track order is not messed up.
Hopefully this may help other people who are having the same issue.

Music playlist track order... iTunes vs ATV 2nd Gen

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I contacted an Express Lane advisor about this, case number 186510612, and was politely advised that there's apparently no solution. The advisor recommended that I submit feedback (which I did).
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I couldn't agree more. I, too, have been an Apple/Mac user from the beginning. This seemed like such an elementary issue that I was convinced I was missing something simple. Evidently not, based on your experience and the response I got from tech support. I encourage you to report this issue in "feedback" http://www.apple.com/feedback/ and maybe Apple will fix it in a software update.
For now, ATV is almost unusuable for streaming live album playlists with "intro" tracks. Moreover, studio album track order on ATV does not correspond with that intended by the album producer which, in itself, denegrates the artistic experience.

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I have recently noticed that the track order in some of my albums has gone all screwy. Even though when I go to >Get Info, and verify that the track order and disk number is correct, they don't appear in the order listed.
For Example, when I sort by album, the tracks now appear in this order:
Track 7
Track 11
Track 13
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Track 1
Track 2
Track 3, etc...
I realized there were some issues with iTunes version 7, and have updated to version 7.0.1, but even after I have reput the track info they still appear out of order.
Dell Dimension 8400 Windows XP Recently updated from iTunes 7 to iTunes 7.0.1

Ahh... yep, that was it. Never would've even bothered to change those, because I didn't think it would effect the track order..
^_^ Thanks a bunch.

ITunes Album Track Order

I basically spend 8 hr a day listening to iTunes and I have a really frustrating issue that I can't imagine should be as difficult to get around - but I can't seem to figure it out.
I buy quite a bit of music either through emusic, itunes or cd's. Since I had probably 1/2 dozen albums a week, I ideally want to open itunes and just start listening to the last album I imported (in order) followed by the 2nd most recent album, etc -- and ideally listen for my entire workday. The problem is multifaceted:
1. Emusic automatically imports music I download. It processes them in reverse order, which is good since it makes song #1 the most recent "date added" which allows me to sort by "date added" and listen in order. Unfortunately, since it processes multiple songs at a time, shorter songs beat the song before it -- and it makes a mess of the track order. They get numbered correctly, but they're "date added" are incorrect -- which messes up my listening order.
2. When I import a CD, it starts at track 1 -- making it impossible to use the "dated added"field as a sort.
3. I believe Itunes acts like a cd on importing, so again the order is bungled.
I have about 6,000 songs so I don't think it's feasible to change each CD one by one, but I can't imagine there isn't some way to just listen to my newest album, in order, then my next newest, etc.
Does anyone know if there's a way to do this? I can't imagine I'm the only person who listens to music this way. Right now, I wind up filtering to the album, sorting by track, and listening to CD's one by one. I can get through like 20 albums in a day, so this it makes it really tought to get into a flow at work.
This has bothered me for well over a year, and I've searched many discussion groups and haven't come across any similar threads -- so I decided to just ask flat out.
Any help would be incredible, thank you.

hmmm... I didn't realize that was an option, but that definitely helps. I guess part two can be to request emusic to NOT IMPORT automatically, and I can just load the tracks in reverse order.
Of course that helps moving forward, but I guess I'm stuck with out of order imports on the existing library (not the end of the world).
I really wish Itunes would allow a secondary sort to allow us to sort albums and just leave the track numbers alone -- I'd say 99% of the time, people want the album tracks in order, so it's silly to have most of the sort options mess with that order.

Track order wrong even with "artist-album" sort

I've been having this problem ever since upgrading to iTunes 7 and I was a hard core non-updater until I bought a new computer and had to.
When I sort by Album, the tracks aren't in order. When I sort by "Album-Artist" most are in track order except compilation CDs which had been ripped with Windows Media Player (before my iPod days). When I moved my music to my new computer I forgot to uncheck that little box next to let iTunes do my sorting and it sorted my compilation CDs by artist. Is this why I can't get them in order? More importantly, am I going to have to re-rip all these compilation CDs to get them in order? Is there a good trick to get these compilations tagged correctly? They're all double disks from Germany so I'm worried I'll have to do it by hand.

Album art issue?
(Just a SWAG, but AA has caused these kinds of issues before). Try this -- in iTunes (not in a standalone editor, which may be editing the wrong format tags) select all the songs in the album and make sure they all have the same album name and artist name. Then copy and paste into the album art box the album art (I use albumart.org, but Amazon.com is also a good source for copying). This will store your art into the song rather than album (assuming you may have gotten your art from iTunes).
Reset your phone, restore your phone, and then resync. That ought to do it.

Compilation Albums are not ordered by track order - by alphabet/artist

This is something I just noticed with iTunes that I would like to have fixed if possible. I've ripped a good handful of compilation albums onto my computer, and when I put them into iTunes, and order the songs by album, all of the differing artists on a certain album are in alphabetical order. Meaning, the track order is set not as track 1, track 2, track 3, etc. Instead, it's set up by artist, by alphabet. For example, Animosity will be first, and Zebrahead will be last...and these aren't in the correct order of the album! I don't know if there is a fix for this, but if there is, I would greatly appreciate the help. Thanks.

*HowTo: Grouping Tracks Into Albums*
Excuse the long post, but hopefully covering all the bases (that I can think of) will help you fix the other issues you are likely to run into as you try to organise your iTunes library.
*Use an album friendly view*
iTunes will let you sort music on many columns, some of which are unlikely to group albums together. The most useful order for editing the library is probably *Album by Artist*. If you're not already there, select the list view and click on the column heading for Artist until it reads Album by Artist.
*One cover, too many tracks*
The iPod (and iTunes to a lesser extent) conflates two or more albums with the same title, most obviously with *Greatest Hits*. On the iPod this can result in one album acting as a combination of two or more. Selecting any cover gives all the tracks of all albums with the same title. The workaround for this "Greatest Hits" bug is to give each album a unique title - I tend to go for *Album - Album Artist* as this reads clearly in the iTunes browser. Alternatively you could use the wording as it appears on the cover or append different numbers of spaces for each different album. Somewhat oddly, setting different values for Sort Album doesn't work.
*Album not with others by same artist*
iTunes relies on the Gracenote CDDB database when identifying CD's. This often marks collections or anthologies of an artist's work as a compilation. In iTunes, however, the compilation flag has the logical function of grouping together tracks with the same album name, but different artists on each track, e.g. "Now That's What I Call Metal 666!". These compilations are then all grouped together at the end of cover flow. Most of us however, would expect "Greatest Hits" albums to be listed with the other albums by the same album artist. For albums which are essentially by a single album artist or group it is best to set the appropriate value for the album artist and clear the compilation flag.
*One album, too many covers*
Sadly the iPod ignores the Album Artist field when grouping albums which causes problems when some tracks list guest artists. You can simply mark the entire album as a compilation which seems to be the way iTMS handles it, however that's not an ideal fix. Short of waiting for Apple to address this issue (and as far as I can tell it goes back to the 1st gen. of iPods) we need a workaround. What I do is to put any additional artist info. in square brackets after the song name. E.g. *Track \[Feat. Guest\]* and then set *Artist=Album Artist* for each track. For anthologies where the Album Artist is credited as part of another group, e.g. for Cream tracks on an Eric Clapton anthology, I use *Track \[As Group\]*. For a track where the main Album Artist doesn't receive a credit, e.g. the first track of the Slim Shady LP credited to Jeff Bass, I just set the track name to *Track \[Guest\]* while still setting the artist to the album artist. N.b. I use square brackets to indicate this is not part of the actual song title and also use this style for Mix/Live/Bonus info.
*One album, still too many covers*
iTunes may split albums into two or more sections if some tracks from the album have different values for Artist, Album Artist, Album, No. of Discs or Part of a Compilation. Tiny differences such as trailing spaces, accented characters or variants of symbols can sometimes be quite hard to spot. The iPod is also more sensitive to case variations and may split or reorder an album that looks okay in iTunes. Normally overtyping the desired value for each shared field will complete the grouping of the album into one entity. Occasionally, however, this method seems to fail. When this happens I've found that you can force every field to update properly by adding some extra text - e.g. a trailing X, which once applied seems to complete the joining of the tracks into one album. Once this has happened the extra data can be removed and the album should remain properly grouped.
*Tried that, there are STILL too many covers!*
The Sort Artist, Sort Album & Sort Album Artist fields can be used to override the normal sort order. For example iTunes automatically drops leading articles (a/an/the) so "The Beatles" are arranged under "B" instead of "T". Occasionally different tracks from the same album can have different values in these sort fields which can also break up the grouping. Making the sort columns visible in iTunes can help with spotting & correcting such problems.
*One cover for multi-disc album*
Multi-disc albums are often listed as *Album (CD1)* for CD 1, *Album (CD2)* for CD 2 etc. To display these properly using just one cover, each disc should have the correct *Disc X of Y* values set, and then the entire album should be given the single title Album. Being somewhat obsessive I also renumber the tracks sequentially, working backwards from the last track (so that no two tracks ever have the same number) until I reach disc 1. BTW You can still give the individual discs different artwork should it be relevant so that the correct artwork will be displayed as the album progresses.
*One artist, many names*
With some artists, particularly classical composers, you should be aware of alternative representations of their names. E.g. 2Pac vs. Tupac. The menus will work best if for each artist you standardise on just one form of their name. E.g. make a choice between Mozart, W.A. Mozart or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and then apply it consistently. For classical music I tend also to use the Composer as the Artist & Album Artist and either discard the performer details or place these into the Comments field.
tt2

Playing albums in track order-please

Why and how can it be so freaking hard to play an album on itunes starting with the first track and then go on from there in order!??
The only way is to go to the search area and look up the album, and then hit the track # tab. Or to always organize your music by artist. This is ridiculous. I personally like to view my music in the 'date added' order and I can find no way to fix this problem.
Artist and recording engineers and producers spend many hours sequencing a full collection of songs, choosing the track order, deciding how many seconds should go in between pieces, so some of us really want to respect this and listen to whole albums the way that they were intended to be played!
Please add an option that helps solve this!!!
B.

iTunes plays things in the order in which they are displayed on the playlist which you are playing. If you're playing a playlist in which you are viewing items in order added and that doesn't happen to be the track order then by order added is what you'll get. If you start the list in track order and then change the display to order added then it will switch to that order. One way is to have two sets of playlists and view one in order added while playing the second in album mode. Of course the highlight won't be on the currently playing track, but at least you can continue to view your music in whatever order you wish while the other list continues to play the tracks in order. Alternatively, just make sure your tracks are added to your list by play order, then at least it will play in the correct order within an album.
Apple doesn't use the AD forums for providing product feedback or suggestions since this intended to be an end-user to end-user (i.e., users like you helping other users) technical issue support feature. You should send feedback via:
[http://www.apple.com/feedback> - Apple products feedback links

Playing Albums in Track Order

Using iPod Classic I'm able to make an album play in track order if I select it from the album list but it seems album tracks always display and play in alphabetical order if selected via a search.
Is it possible to make individual albums always display and play in track order?

iTunes plays things in the order in which they are displayed on the playlist which you are playing. If you're playing a playlist in which you are viewing items in order added and that doesn't happen to be the track order then by order added is what you'll get. If you start the list in track order and then change the display to order added then it will switch to that order. One way is to have two sets of playlists and view one in order added while playing the second in album mode. Of course the highlight won't be on the currently playing track, but at least you can continue to view your music in whatever order you wish while the other list continues to play the tracks in order. Alternatively, just make sure your tracks are added to your list by play order, then at least it will play in the correct order within an album.
Apple doesn't use the AD forums for providing product feedback or suggestions since this intended to be an end-user to end-user (i.e., users like you helping other users) technical issue support feature. You should send feedback via:
[http://www.apple.com/feedback> - Apple products feedback links

ITunes screws up track order and randomly screws up volume level

I'm really starting to regret replacing my 5g video with the classic. The video out issue is one problem, but my biggest issue is my Media Monkey isn't compatible and I had to go back to iTunes. First off I hate using iTunes to manage content. The format ***. But a bigger issue is why does having info in the id3 tag that has nothing to do with the track order of an album screw up the order? I shouldn't have to delete fields like "Album Artist" to get things to sort correctly. Track number should be the ONLY criteria for sorting tracks in an album. The second issue is, I've had problems witrh not being able to hear tracks, no volume. When I check in iTunes it has somehow adjusted the volume to zero for those tracks! I'll be happy when MM updates their software to work with the classic.

yosarian wrote:
I don't know what column I am sorting on when I drag the mp3s over to iTunes. It's whatever the default order is when you create a new play list.
I believe the default is to sort the songs in the order they were added to the playlist. If you want to keep them in track order, you can click on the "Track #" or "Album" column headers.
As for the built in browser duplicating the individual play lists, how does my ipod know which songs belong together? The artist to album menu? I have never used the browser feature, so will have to play with it when I get home.
When determining whether songs are part of the same album, I believe iTunes and iPods look at the Album, Album Artist (or Artist if there is none), and Disc # fields, and whether or not the album is marked as a compilation. If all those fields are filled out, there shouldn't be any trouble with the Browser recognizing albums.

Track order changing on ipod since updating to itunes7

after upgrading to itunes7, i updated my ipod, to find that on some of my albums the track order had changed. for example, track 7 would be before track 1.
i dont understand why its happening, as the track order on my itunes library is correct.
someone had a similar problem with track order changing but it was happening to their itunes library. heres the link for that http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=663895&tstart=15
i left a post on that thread to see if i get any replies from that.
i use windows xp and have a fat colour display ipod.
can anyone help me out?
thanx

I'm experiencing the same issue: iTunes (7.0.1.8) OK, iPod (5th gen) some albums messed up. Checked album settings, e.g. 'Artist', 'Album artist', 'track numbers' and reimported album, etc., however, so far unsatisfactorily. Did you manage to solve the problem?

Playlist track order

Anyone know how to make a custom order of tracks in a playlist? I accidentally alphabetised my favourite playlist and want my old track order back but it won't let me drag them around to change it. Thanks :)

I am SO HAPPY :smileyvery-happy: to report I have (sort of) found the solution to the playlist re-ordering issue!! It's very odd how this works, but it's the only way I've found to do it, so here goes.
PROBLEM: If you have sorted a playlist by any of the column headings, you then find you cannot reorder by drag & dropping.
'WORK-AROUND' SOLUTION: <Assumes you have first done a sort by any column heading in *any* Playlist>
1. Click on and 'Star' any song in playlist.
2, Click on and re-sort by whatever column heading you just did a sort by.
3, Click on and re-sort AGAIN by same column as in step 2.
4. Select/Click on any song in Playlist, Re-order by Drag & Drop to whatever place you desire in Playlist.
Additional Notes/Observations:
I did notice that it *seems* to be true that once you have completed the above process, all of the other Playlists are also able to be re-ordered without repeating this process in each one, as long as you do not sort by a column heading again. From what I observed, it appears that once you do so, you must than repeat the entire process as outlined above in order to be able to again re-order your Playlist(s).
I hope everyone finds this 'goofy' solution helpful and if it does not work for aome reason, please post your experience here so that we may troubleshoot it and make sure we've got it right. It would be nice if this were added to some sort of Spotify 'Toolkit' App as an integrated 'intuitve' process! We can only hope, right? :robotfrustrated:
Best of

Track order issues

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