Can iTunes have a play order that's different from it's display order?

[Bodega.]

Hi all,

There's something that's been bugging me for ages, literally years:

I've got a whole lot of music, 45 days worth, and I view it by date added and want to keep it that way for a number of reasons.

Problem is, when I want to play an album I have to click on the first track, then switch to album (or artist) display by the end of that track.

The other day I added an album by dragging it into iTunes in the Finder. I noticed that I could start and stop and advance and rewind tracks and it would go in order, from first to last track, even in Date Added mode, so it was visually moving up and down instead of from top to bottom.

Is there secretly a way to view in Date Added but have the next track be the next track on that album? Besides dragging the tracks into iTunes from the Finder I mean.

If anyone has a way to do this, it would seriously improve my life and I would be infinitely grateful.

Matthew

El bumpo!

 

[foranor]

El bumpo!

Any reason you can't just add a playlist with all your songs in the 'proper' playing order? You can watch your songs by date added and play the playlist...?

Or am I not getting the problem?

 

[Bodega.]

That would work well with one album at a time - and sometimes I do do that - but I'm talking about my whole library of hundreds of albums.

With a playlist I'd have to add thousands of tracks individually by date added AND by track.

Unless I don't really understand what you mean.

 

[myjellyass]

Seems a bit odd that you need to do this, but the itunes library will only play in the order that you're viewing it in, so if you're viewing it by date added then you'll only be able to play them by date added.

You could put your entire collection into a playlist then order that by album or however you want to play them. That way you can keep your library in whichever order you like and your playlist will still play in order of album.
You could also make a smart playlist to automatically add your music and then do the same as above with that.

EDIT: You don't have to add songs individually to a playlist. Select all by pressing +A when you've selected one of your songs, then drag that to a new playlist.

 

[Bodega.]

Hmmmm... A smart playlist might be a solution. I'm going to have a look into that right now.

As an aside: if there was a way to add albums into iTunes so that it automatically added them from tracks 1-whatever, then I wouldn't have this problem.

As another aside: The reason I couldn't just hit Command-A and drag is that it would drag in the tunes in the same order as I'm currently viewing them. So if I did that while I'm viewing in Date Added, they'd be in chronological order, but I'd still have to rearrange tracks within each album, which would take days.

 

[slothrob]

As another aside: The reason I couldn't just hit Command-A and drag is that it would drag in the tunes in the same order as I'm currently viewing them. So if I did that while I'm viewing in Date Added, they'd be in chronological order, but I'd still have to rearrange tracks within each album, which would take days.

You don't need to rearrange the songs. Once you click on the Album column heading, the songs will be ordered as they appear on the album.

 

[androiphone]

smart playlist: media kind > is > music then + and
> date added > is after > 1970, and live updating on,
then you then have another library view and just set it to album order start your music in that one and it will play through the album in order