Sorting Songs by Track List in iTunes

“Apple are hip, they’re down with the kids and they make usable stuff that just works!”. “How hard can it be?” - I asked myself.

“Pretty ridiculously hard!” – I replied about 15 minutes, and a few Google searches, later.

I added The Best of Talking Heads to iTunes today and I noticed that iTunes had a spastic attack and decided to take the law into its own hands and took it upon itself to rearrange the order of the tracks. Instead of opening with Psycho Killer followed by Take Me To The River, iTunes had me listening to And She Was (Track 8) followed by Blind (11). If David Byrne wanted And She Was to be the track opener; he would have chosen to do so. Instead he, and the rest of Talking Heads, choose a track listing that they felt best suited this album.

So why doesn’t iTunes respect the logical order of the track listing?
- Because it’s the most illogically devised piece of shit software I have ever had the misfortune to use. I hate it!!! (takes a breath)

Sorry for the outburst but this kind of nonsense really grinds my gears.

How hard can it be to put the tracks in the order they’re meant to be by default? iTunes provides some sorting options but attempting to make sense of it is a frustrating process. If I click on “Track #” ALL my Number 1 tracks are listed with ALL of my Number 2 tracks following, and so forth.

Obviously that’s not what I wanted to do.

I want to sort by number within albums, not within my entire library. If I highlight the album and click Track #; nothing happens. If I click shift, alt, apple key, batman key, or the any key followed by Track #; nothing happens.

So… How can I sort album tracks in the correct order within iTunes?

One option to is create a playlist that includes the entire track range of the album you want to arrange properly. But that’s not a proper solution. It’s not logical to create a playlist for one album or for every single album in your library. Why should you and I have to do a work around to get such a simple thing as putting the tracks in the same order as they appear on a CD? Making a playlist will fix the problem but it’s not a logical long term solution.

But there is a solution that works (kind of!). If you click arrange by track # (so its a big list of #1, #2 etc) then click arrange by artist, then click arrange by album; you should have each one of your albums sorted in order. This sequence of hitting sorting buttons will put your tunes in an alphabetical order of artist, then alphabetical by album of that artist, then by track listing.

Excellent!

I like my iTunes library to have the most recently added album at the beginning. Unfortunately it seems that I can’t choose Date Added as a final sorting option and keep the tracks in their preferred order. For this type of functionality a compromise is in order! If I visit the Recently Added playlist the most recently added tracks are presented to me and I can order them by track listing by clicking Artist, Track #, and Artist.

Not a perfect setup but it works, somewhat.

Overall this is a very frustrating user experience. It’s such a simple request. Why can’t Apple present the iTunes library in a logical manner with easy to use sorting options? Does anybody else share my frustration with iTunes and more specifically with the library?