Sorting in iTunes

persona non grata

I recently came into possession of The Beatles discography and want to sort them on iTunes by release date, which has turned out to be easier said than done. Many of the albums came out in the same year so, for instance, iTunes puts Magical Mystery Tour before Sgt Pepper's, despite Sgt Pepper's being the first of the two that was released in '67.

Does anyone have an advanced knowledge of sorting in iTunes that can aid my sad, OCD problem?

admanb

There's no simple solution. ID3 tags (which aren't a property of iTunes, they're just used by it) don't track any form of date besides the year.

One thing you could do is go to Get Info > Sorting and change all the sorted values for albums that overlap. i.e. select every song from Sgt. Peppers and change Sort Name/Sort Artist/etc to "A", then do the same for Magical Mystery Tour, but change everything to "B." That way whatever criteria iTunes uses to sort albums with the same release year will put them in the right order.

That'll screw up the rest of your sorting, however. :P

wunderbar

yea, it's not a limitation of iTunes, but an ID3 limitation, you're out of luck unless you do workarounds and such that'll fuck up the rest of it.

matt has a problem

Edit the release date in the ID3 tag to not be the release date. Just make the release date the order the albums were released. So Please Please Me would be 0001 instead of 1963, and so on.