Itunes album track: obstinate disorder

October 14, 2007 7:26 PM

Occasionally in iTunes, I'll be unable to get an album's tracks to line up in the proper order even if I've set all the track numbers properly. It occurs with albums that have been [ahem] cobbled together from various sources.

Even after setting the album and artist names to be uniform, and setting the track numbering, some songs just resist getting in line - they stay at the end or the beginning. Is there a way to fix it or have these mp3s been encoded to only be in a batch together?

posted by greggish to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Check all the fields in the track info. Sometimes if one file has a value filled in for the "Album Artist" or something, it will be sorted separately from other files with the same Album and Artist names.
posted by transient at 7:30 PM on October 14, 2007

Yes, “Album Artist” has been a source of much consternation for me as well. Make sure you don’t have your iTunes library sorted by “Album by Artist”. (“Artist” seems to work best.)
posted by tepidmonkey at 7:36 PM on October 14, 2007

And make sure you have the disc numbers correct. If a song has a tag that says it's "Disc 1 of 1" and another doesn't have a disc number tag at all, it'll be separated.
posted by SansPoint at 7:45 PM on October 14, 2007

Huh. i always thought i was checking for that information as well, but just now on one of my problem albums, when editing info for all the tracks at once, i made sure that the album artist field was blank and checked the box next to it, and this seems to have cleared up the problem. awesome.
posted by greggish at 7:48 PM on October 14, 2007

Sometimes even the album artist tag doesn't help. In that case, I select all tracks, get info, change the album name to something else, press ok, then go back and change it back. This usually fixes them.
posted by Baldons at 4:46 AM on October 15, 2007

also check -- some songs have fields filled in for both Track Number and "Out of how mnay tracks" (can't remember the actual name of that field, the one that has the total number of tracks on an album.") If you have this filled in for some and not for others, i think that makes a difference in how they order themselves.
posted by Soulbee at 11:13 AM on October 15, 2007