iTunes album sorting (Driving me CRAZY!)

[PinkyMacGodess]

Sometimes iTunes just seems so crazy.

I have an album (Jimmy Buffett - Songs From St Somewhere) and it's listed in the B's under the artist tab 'Jimmy Buffett'. I kid you not! Look:



And that album should be going right between the two shown here:



But I've edited the entire Info and Sorting information for that album, and can't get it in the right artist location! Is there some kind of metadata that iTunes has that would stop this from happening? It's just crazy and I've wasted too much time on it... Drat drat drat!

Thanks for any ideas or clues to this mystery...

AND I have a single track that is part of another album that is in this 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the B's, and the rest of the album's tracks are in the 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the J's! Same album, split for some who-freaking-knows reason... ARGGG!

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

That single track is a video apparently, which I thought you shouldn't be able to see through the standard 'Music' selection. I actually have three videos in that 'Jimmy Buffett' in the B's section.

Is that odd?

 

[smirk]

I'm no iTunes expert, but I do like Jimmy Buffett.

So all my 38 Buffett albums show up in the list in the J's. The "Info" tab of the Get Info window shows the Artist field filled out ("Jimmy Buffett") and the Album, but the Album Artist field is empty.

On the "Sorting" tab, once again the Artist and Album fields are filled out, but all the sorting fields are blank.

Is that how yours is?

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I'm no iTunes expert, but I do like Jimmy Buffett.

So all my 38 Buffett albums show up in the list in the J's. The "Info" tab of the Get Info window shows the Artist field filled out ("Jimmy Buffett") and the Album, but the Album Artist field is empty.

On the "Sorting" tab, once again the Artist and Album fields are filled out, but all the sorting fields are blank.

Is that how yours is?

Yep, just did it. No change. I wondered if there was a limit on the number of albums in an artist entry as I have nearly 50 albums.

One thing that's weird is that the icon for the 'Jimmy Buffett' in the B's looks like the ebook cover for 'A Salty Piece of Land' which seems very odd because it's in the iBooks app now but must share the iTunes database.

I'm beginning to think that this iTunes database has been tainted over time, and might need to be rebuilt AGAIN. This all seems too ridiculous. I've had to rebuild iTunes databases several times over the past few years. Can't Apple come up with a database utility to fix inconsistencies?

I did just Show in Finder and it showed one of the B's files in the same location as in the J's files, as if it were a copy, same size, name differing by the leading number, with both having a Kind of 'DocumentType', and both having extensions of 'm4v' so they are video files, but why are they showing up in the Music section...

 

[gnasher729]

Yep, just did it. No change. I wondered if there was a limit on the number of albums in an artist entry as I have nearly 50 albums.

One thing that's weird is that the icon for the 'Jimmy Buffett' in the B's looks like the ebook cover for 'A Salty Piece of Land' which seems very odd because it's in the iBooks app now but must share the iTunes database.

I'm beginning to think that this iTunes database has been tainted over time, and might need to be rebuilt AGAIN. This all seems too ridiculous. I've had to rebuild iTunes databases several times over the past few years. Can't Apple come up with a database utility to fix inconsistencies?

I did just Show in Finder and it showed one of the B's files in the same location as in the J's files, as if it were a copy, same size, name differing by the leading number, with both having a Kind of 'DocumentType', and both having extensions of 'm4v' so they are video files, but why are they showing up in the Music section...

Sometimes it helps in iTunes to change something to something totally different, and then changing it back.

Also, "Get Info" for a group of songs only displays things that are the same for all songs. So if you had sort name = Buffet, Jimmy for some and sort name = Buffet, Jim for other songs, then Get Info for the whole group doesn't display it. Try "Get Info" on the individual songs, then look at Album Artist and "Sort"

For Audiobooks, I actually do sort everything that way (by last name), and use the sort order for album titles to make sure they come up in a reasonable order. Books that should be read / listened to in some order should be sorted in that order, not alphabetically.

 

[Curun]

Sometimes iTunes just seems so crazy.

I have an album (Jimmy Buffett - Songs From St Somewhere) and it's listed in the B's under the artist tab 'Jimmy Buffett'. I kid you not! Look:

View attachment 463516

And that album should be going right between the two shown here:

View attachment 463517

But I've edited the entire Info and Sorting information for that album, and can't get it in the right artist location! Is there some kind of metadata that iTunes has that would stop this from happening? It's just crazy and I've wasted too much time on it... Drat drat drat!

Thanks for any ideas or clues to this mystery...

AND I have a single track that is part of another album that is in this 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the B's, and the rest of the album's tracks are in the 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the J's! Same album, split for some who-freaking-knows reason... ARGGG!

I have 19 albums, 224 tracks... but missing your specific album .... haha damn.

All of mine are perfectly together. Here's a screenshot of an info panel on a track.

 

[smirk]

AND I have a single track that is part of another album that is in this 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the B's, and the rest of the album's tracks are in the 'Jimmy Buffett' location in the J's!

I've had this happen many times, and it has always been something minor that I didn't see the first three times I looked at the tags. Gnasher729 had a good point: when you select several songs and Get Info, it doesn't display any fields that differ from one another; it only shows identical fields. So you have to Get Info on one song at a time to really see what's going on. Maybe there's something crazy on that one song that's making it different, like the "Part of a compilation" or "Media type" fields (I doubt it's those, but you get the idea).

I don't think it's too likely that the iTunes database is corrupt to the point where songs randomly show up in different places.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I have 19 albums, 224 tracks... but missing your specific album .... haha damn.

All of mine are perfectly together. Here's a screenshot of an info panel on a track.

(Like that A1A cover)

All that album's tracks have the name as 'Jimmy Buffett', sorting, composer, album artist, everything is 'Jimmy Buffett'. That's what's driving me batty... I mean, everything I look at shows that it *should* be in the J's, not stuck in the B's... It's as if that album entry has carrying a 'charm' from some metadata somehow...

----------

I've had this happen many times, and it has always been something minor that I didn't see the first three times I looked at the tags. Gnasher729 had a good point: when you select several songs and Get Info, it doesn't display any fields that differ from one another; it only shows identical fields. So you have to Get Info on one song at a time to really see what's going on. Maybe there's something crazy on that one song that's making it different, like the "Part of a compilation" or "Media type" fields (I doubt it's those, but you get the idea).

I don't think it's too likely that the iTunes database is corrupt to the point where songs randomly show up in different places.

Checked all of the tracks, and all are listed the same way... Yeah, I've found single tracks from CDDB that have the Compilation charm set. That will drive someone nuts.

The last time I rebuilt my iTunes database was because of one Sammy Hagar album that would not come out of the 'Compilations' section at the top. I finally somehow detonated the entire Sammy Hagar artist tag as some of the tracks totally disappeared. I had to delete what I could find, and repopulate Sammy from a different computer I have here as a music server.

I've gotten the idea that the iTunes 'database' (I think it's a 'flat' XML file and not a true database) gets flaky at times. I've had some bizarre things happen with mine over the years.

Thanks, I'll keep poking away, and if there are any other ideas, PLEASE post!

It really shouldn't be this hard...

 

[Curun]

(Like that A1A cover)

All that album's tracks have the name as 'Jimmy Buffett', sorting, composer, album artist, everything is 'Jimmy Buffett'. That's what's driving me batty... I mean, everything I look at shows that it *should* be in the J's, not stuck in the B's... It's as if that album entry has carrying a 'charm' from some metadata somehow...

Make sure the 'compilation' tick mark isn't checked. That triggers to be sorted by album name rather than artist. Which should be an 'S' in your case and not 'B'.

I dunno.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Make sure the 'compilation' tick mark isn't checked. That triggers to be sorted by album name rather than artist. Which should be an 'S' in your case and not 'B'.

I dunno.

Haven't tried sorting by album. Maybe...

Nope. Everything shows perfect for that album. Damn!!!

 

[smirk]

Sometimes it helps in iTunes to change something to something totally different, and then changing it back.

This sometimes does help.

What Curun meant is to make sure the "Part of a compilation" field in Get Info isn't checked.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

This sometimes does help.

What Curun meant is to make sure the "Part of a compilation" field in Get Info isn't checked.

I'll try that. The xml file is just track info apparently. Yeah, I've tripped on that Compilation stuff before. It's either on the album, or on a few tracks. It's always a pain...

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

This is getting even more interesting.

I had a track that turned out to be a video of 'Drummer Boy' from Debi Nova that was in the Jimmy Buffett in the B's section. It was marked as being part of the 'Encores (Live)' Buffett album. I ignored it thinking that it was just misfiled somehow. Well, the actual file WAS in the 'Jimmy Buffett' folder under the 'Encores (Live)' album folder but turns out she never did anything (that I can tell) with Buffett. The track is totally in the wrong place.

I also have the Margaritaville CD's and tried to get them to go under the Jimmy Buffett artist tag, and can't get them to move there. It's the damnedest thing to get this all messed up... What the heck happened?

I'm getting more and more discouraged at the stability of the iTunes database with every discovery!

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I'm going to get severely drunk...

If I click Artists and then All Artists, that album (Songs from St. Somewhere) shows up with the other albums under Jimmy Buffett (In the J's). I changed the artist everywhere for that album to just 'Buffett' and it showed up under all of the Jimmy Buffett albums with a tag above it titled 'Buffett'. SO I change the artist info back to 'Jimmy Buffett', and it pops back into the Jimmy Buffett in the B's again when I click on that tag...

I feel like I should be running screaming down the street naked, but it's like 12 degrees outside. I'm not *quite* that crazy *YET*! Close...