The community Taskforce initiative has now come to a close.
Thanks to everyone who made thoughtful and genuine contributions to the website.
All submissions will be kept publically available for the forseeable future for reference purposes.

This website is part of the community Taskforce initiative

Submission details

26 +26/-0 votes

iTunes: when sorting by date added, tracks appear out of order within each album

Submitted by migueld on December 16, 2008 to Annoyance, Usability

When looking at the latest albums that one adds to his/her library, it'd be useful if the tracks within each album appeared in order. There are a couple of workarounds such as using applescripts, or a smart playlists, but none prove to be an ideal solution.

A possible solution could be to add a new property such as "Date Added by Track#" or "Album by Date Added" so that all tracks within an album are shown in ascending track # order (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc ) regardless of whether the listing is in ascending or descending orientation.

Medium

Medium

Not fixed

Discussion (5 comments)

migueld wrote on December 16, 2008, 7:54pm

Changed severity from [Low] to [Medium].
Changed impact from [Low] to [Medium].

migueld wrote on December 16, 2008, 11:19pm

Changed problem description.

migueld wrote on December 20, 2008, 12:25pm

Changed problem description.

ebaur wrote on April 5, 2009, 5:57pm

There is a similar item elsewhere on this site, but I like the proposed solution here better.

oybobby wrote on April 6, 2009, 3:55am

This is high among the most annoying "features" of iTunes.

Miguel's solution seems that it would fix it, although there's some ambiguity in his presentation.

I'd say it this way: sorting by date added should really force all tracks for an Album to be sorted as though they have the same date/time stamp, and then sort Track number within the Album and Disc number.

And I agree that the track number should always be sorted in ascending sequence for any Album sort.

Thanks.

Regards,
Maurice

ebaur wrote on April 6, 2009, 5:54am

What I liked about this solution compared to the other one is that this one talks about adding a property, not changing the meaning of the "Date Added" property. The idea that clicking on a field would sort by something other than the data in that field is very wrong, in my mind.

Specifically, as I think I mentioned in the other thread, the concept of a "Date Album Added" would probably work best, if you could figure out what date that should take. For example, what should it do when you add tracks months apart? I assume it would take the initial date.

evonline wrote on June 15, 2009, 12:49am

When I listen to music I most start my listening session with the music I have added most recently. If I have added an entire album recently I want to hear the album in the order the "artist" intended it to be heard. I would think many people would be keen to hear the things they have added most recently. The lack of an option to sort by "Date Added by Track#" is terribly annoying for me.

jetsetter wrote on January 12, 2010, 6:52pm

This is a big annoyance for me. It means if I add several albums in a day and want to listen to each straight through in order it requires manual playlist creation. I googled around and was unable to find the smart playlist or applescripts mentioned that perform this duty. Can someone please point me towards these workarounds?

You might also be interested in...