Wow, thanks for mentioning that... iTunes is now officially perfect.

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I just tried this out, and I noticed something interesting: under Sort by Album and Year, iTunes disregards the year as set on the file itself.

I've set dates on tracks individually in the case of compilations with material from different years, and iTunes stacks those tracks by the *date of release of the album* - which suggests to me that iTunes is phoning home, despite the Store being disabled in my install.

- unless there is some other explanation?

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It must have retrieved this info when checking for album art. Very cool - however, it's not very reliable. For many albums it is the original release date, for others a re-release date. For some of my Grateful Dead, it is the performance date...

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Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
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I can't make any sense out of the Album by Year.. The date column shows no such sorting at all.

Even if I restrict my view to iTM^HS purchased songs, it still makes no sense.



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I'm too old for a fancy .sig

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"Album" seems to sort by the album name,
"Album by Artist" sorts by artist then album name,
"Album by Year" sorts by artist then year of the album

... I think.

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Could be. But where does it get the album date from?

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"Album by Year" is kind of misleading. It's actually sorted by Artist first, Year second, so you get all Bob Dylan albums in chronological order before you get, say, all of Fats Waller's albums in chronological order.

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Is this broken for anyone else? When I sort my New Order albums by "Album by Year" I get one from 1995, then 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1989, and finally 2003. If I sort by just Year though, it works fine. What gives? Is it getting these dates from somewhere other than the ID3 tags?

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How is this different than just clicking on artist? I don't get it.

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If you click on Artist, it's sorted first alphabetically by artist, then alphabetically by album.

If you do Album by Artist, it sorts first alphabetically by artist, then CHRONOLOGICALLY by album. Kinda nice.

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The difference is that with "album by artist," compilation albums stick together, rather than having them split up by artist (when ordered by artist).

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Great feature and great Hint!

Note that sort order determines the order in which Coverflow displays album art; using "Album by Artist" mimics the "classic"Coverflow order.

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Jim

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I sort my library by Genre... it looks like even if I click the Artist column a couple times to change it to "Album by Year," if I then click the Genre column, it no longer sorts the albums any differently than it used to. This new feature becomes useless, for no good reason!

What I've always wanted is to have my entire music library sorted this way:

* Sort by genre
* Within genre, sort by artist
* Within artist sort albums/tracks by year

I guess we're getting slightly closer. Maybe iTunes 8 or 9 will do this. GRRR!

(I also would like disclosure triangles to hide artists which take up too much space in my library of 12,000 songs.)

Scott

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I have wanted this feauture for some time, but it's a tremendous UI mistake.
Usually I click the 'Album' column to sort it in reverse - now I can click on it to change it *and* I have to click that little arrow to reverse it....

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Agree...

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THANK YOU THANK YOU!
Do you know how long I've been wanting to do this and never knew this feature existed? Awesome!
Now if only it wouldn't jump the playlist to the current playing track when the next song comes on...

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