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dandeco

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 5, 2008
1,259
1,059
Brockton, MA
Some time back, on my M1 MacBook Air I accidentally clicked something on both iMovie and Final Cut Pro that ended up sorting my iTunes (Apple Music) playlist tracks into alphabetical order, and not the order I have them set in Apple Music (like by track number, or chronological order). I can't find any options within iMovie or Final Cut to restore it. Is there a preference file I can temporarily delete to restore that without changing a lot of my other preferences too much? (Not that I have any other custom preferences generally in use.)
 
Hmm...however I choose to order my Music(iTunes) tracks in iMovie, it doesn't affect how they are ordered in Music(iTunes).
Same here. But I want their order in iMovie to match how they are in Music/iTunes, and I can't get it back to doing so.
 
You click the header titles (Title, Time, Show, Season) to sort by whatever you click: once to sort them A-Z, again for Z-A.

If you sorted by something NOT showing in the titles, View menu, View Options and then check a box to add new columns that you can sort. If you don't want to keep that column on permanently, display the same View Options AFTER the sort and then delete the column again by unchecking it.

If you are displaying them as (View menu, As Playlist) sorts don't work in Playlist "view". Change that to View, As Songs, sort them as you want them and then View, As Playlist again. Note that this won't sync the updated sort to an AppleTV (latest additions will still be at the bottom of an AppleTV list). The only remedy for this seems to be to first sort the playlist as you want it and then duplicate the playlist, delete the original playlist, share the new playlist with AppleTV and now all will be in the right order.

I don't think there is ANYTHING in iMovie or FCP that adjusts how things are sorted in iTunes/Music/TV apps. So I'm guessing you only THINK you hit something in those apps that affected sorting in the latter. But even if there is something, the easy fix is to do the (re)sorting to as you want it in the latter apps.
 
As far as I can tell, there's no way to restore the default order once you've manually re-sorted. However, even the default view isn't 100% identical to the one in Music, at least on my machine. For example, I have some songs by Weird Al, which are in Music as "Weird Al" Yankovic, with the quotes as shown. In Music, these are sorted under W, but in iMovie they're at the top of the list.

The sort order must be stored somewhere, but even after looking in ~/Library/Preferences I can't find anything helpful.
 
Ahhhhhh, post #5 helps me better grasp post #1s references to sort order of music within iMovie and FCP. There is the media chooser in those apps. If you (OP) want to keep trying to get that back to how you remember, you might want to check the info here. I'm sure there's a similar bundle of "how to" for FCP too- just do a search.

I fired up FCPX, chose the music media chooser option and- for me- it is sorting by TIME (shortest to longest). I can click other options like Title, Genre, Artist to sort by those options (upper red box shows a few sort option)...

FCPX-Media.jpg


Right-clicking (or control clicking) on Music, displays the menu shown in the left of the screenshot, along with the "Sort Events by" option (lower red box).

Based on your description, Apple may have deleted some other sort options in some update of FCP or iMovie.

However, a workaround that may be much more effective at helping you quickly find what you want is do your sorts in iTunes or Music (much more flexible and easily searched too. You can sort by ANYTHING in those apps). Locate the music file you want, drag (a copy) out of iTunes or Music and into the video file clips browser (just like it is a video clip) and then put it where you want it in your Video Timeline.

In short: you can treat music files just like they are video clips. As such, you don't have to hunt within the (limited) media browser features inside of those apps. Use the much more flexible apps (iTunes or Music).
 
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