Sort your iTunes Music with Album by Artist
Jun 8, 2010 - 15 Comments
If you have a lot of albums by a single artist, it’s nice to be able to group all their music together by artist and by album.
To do so, you’ll want to sort iTunes Albums by the Artist rather than just the alphabetical title of all albums by all artists.
Doing this is easy, in iTunes list view, click on the ‘Album’ column header a few times until the text changes to “Album by Artist”.
I’ve found the ultimate way of sorting on the iphone are the tags in iTunes that you find in the “Get Info” menu and the tab labeled “Sorting”. Using this and Mp3tag to edit the “Sort Name”(can only be viewed if one song is selected) I can sort my music on the iphone “Songs” tab by “artistalbum – year – album – track”.
First you need Mp3tag, once you do select music you want to reorder and drag it to Mp3tag than select all and right-click you should see the “Covert” menu click “Tag-Tag” you’ll be brought to a dialog. In the “Field:” textbox write “TITLESORT”(This is “Sort Name” in iTunes) and in “Format String:” write “%albumartist% %year% %album% %track%” you’ll see a preview of the first song below; click ok when your happy with it.
Second you need iTunes 11 and up, once you do make sure you’ve edited the “Sort Name” by selecting a song right-clicking, see “Get Info” menu than “Sorting” tab, if you see the right data than it’s time to update the iphone. In the iTunes iPhone menu select the “Summery” tab and the checkbox “Sync only checked songs and videos” and “Manually manage music and videos”(it will resync but now you don’t have to). After click the “On This iPhone” tab and click “Autofill” button you’ll see it update your files with the corrected tags.
Hope this helped and thank tunequest for much of the info.
“www . tunequest . org /ipod-sort-y…ease/20080417/”
Hi, Has this Feature been removed in 10.7? I have a MBP running 10.6.3 and it’s fine.
I have just gone to use the feature on 10.7 and repeated pressing at the top of the bar simply changes the top to bottom or bottom to top order…
Can’t believe the first two posts lol. Although I guess it’s understandable if you never had a desire to ‘group’ your music that way. This article did it for me by revealing the click functionality in the header (hey apple, put a line under clickable text or something) , and in the first sentence stating the problem making this feature useful, “you have a lot of albums by a single artist, it’s nice to be able to group all their music together by artist and by album.”. I used to dislike Album by Artist because I thought it was used for something else and didn’t work well. Now that i know what it’s for…
omg thank you so much !!!
It sorts all the songs by various artists and the compilations and puts them together by album when viewig albums. Great feature.
How do you get it back to just album without the artist because something happened and now I can’t just listen to one list of cd’s in a row and its super annoying! How do i get it back???
Hey man,
I was looking for this a long time.
Thank god for this post!
I’m looking for this feature on my iPhone. When you show all your albums, they get sorted by Album Title. This is highly annoying when you’re browsing for a certain artist.
just to reiterate… in short, this sorts by artists, and then sorts by albums of that artist… vs, just sorting by artists where the many songs from that artists from their multiple albums may be all mixed up. still clear as mud?
neil young rocks :)
Yes Ben that is precisely it. I think it’s a lot easier to sort artists by Albums by Artist rather than just artist, in many cases I have so many albums by a single artist it gets really confusing with the albums otherwise. Then again this verbiage can make things sound confusing too huh!
i think that the issue is when you have a mixtape lets say that has a song by neil young. if you organize by artist you will then have a straggler song showing up in your listing that is out side of the album organization stucture that the artist setting naturally conforms too. so basically if you do album by artist it will solve the majority of the stragglers.
I love neil young!~
Cant say I understand what this is either.
I changed the ‘Albums’ to ‘Albums by Artist’ and nothing happened.
How should this sort things differently?
It sorts albums by albums by the artist, rather than just by albums of all artists. So if you have a bunch of albums by a single artist it’ll sort and group those like in the screenshot. It’s pretty nice if you have a bunch of an artists albums!
Hope that clears it up a bit!
-Paul
Huh? I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about – your sentences fail at communicating your thoughts. Please elaborate.