iTunes Doesn’t Sort By Track Number [Fixed]
Have you ever had this problem before? You’re browsing your iTunes library, and for some strange reason, some tracks aren’t listed by track number? In other words, some albums are jumbled up in terms of track number. See the image below for an example…
For some reason, track 8 is sent to the bottom of the list. In some instances, this can happen with multiple tracks in a given album, and the only way to fix it was to click the “Track #” column to sort by track number. But, when switching to view multiple albums, you only see track #1 on all your albums. You get the point. It’s inconvenient.
Well, I’ve found a fix for this, and it’s pretty simple. But, let me set the stage first.
Let’s say, to start out with, you open up iTunes and you have the browser up. You’ve got “All” selected in the Genre, Artist and Album field. You also click the “Album” column so that your library is sorted by album, either ascending or descending. It doesn’t matter. Now you can see your entire library in the track view sorted by album.
From here, select “All” in the “Genre” field. Select the artist you’re having this problem with in the “Artist” field. Select the album that is giving you problems in the “Album” field.
If you’re having this problem, the tracks won’t be listed by track number.
In order to fix this, all you have to do is select all of the songs in the album (highlight one of the songs, then press CTRL + A). All of the songs should be highlighted in blue. Be absolutely sure you only have the songs from the album in question selected. You run the chance of ruining any artist or album titles in your library if not.
Now that you have your songs selected, right-click and select “Get Info.” A window will pop up displaying the information about the tracks you’ve selected. Your next step is to delete the contents of the “Album Artist” (not the “Artist” field) field and make sure there is a check mark in the box next to “Album Artist.” Hit “OK” and you’re all set. You’ll notice that immediately your songs will be sorted by track number!
I’m not sure exactly why iTunes does this in rare circumstances, but that’s it. Problem solved. Hope this helped.
Read a book. It’s good for you.
Tell Me What You Think...
Contact Me!
Subscribe to In Case You're Interested... by Email
You can email me at godkillzyou@gmail.com. I'd love to hear what you have to say about my blog. I mean, you can email me along with leaving comments. I'd actually appreciate that even more.
Also, if you find any books on this site interesting, buy them by clicking on the links found here. It will help me out a little, financially.
Recent Comments
 | Inna cadlum on iTunes Doesn’t Sort By T… |
 | dom on “Unable To Perform End O… |
 | The curious girl. on There Are No Such Things As… |
 | Joe Bresley on iTunes Doesn’t Sort By T… |
 | Joseph on There Are No Such Things As… |
Before you do this, you might try this. Do the “Get Info” on one of the tracks that are sorted correctly and then select the “Info” tab. Then, check out the “Track Number” and “Disc Number” on the right and take note of what is listed. After that, do the same thing on the track(s) that are not sorting correctly and see if they match. If not, update those fields to match and then they should be sorted fine. This worked for me.
Jason,
Thanks for the input. If I come across this problem again, I’ll definite try your suggestion.
Jason,
I just wanted to let you know that I ran across this problem again today with my Suicidal Tendencies album, F.N.G. I checked out what you said, but to no avail. Everything was kosher.
As soon as I cleared out the “Album Artist” field for all tracks on the album, the tracks sorted properly.
The track numbers were fine, but the disc info (1 of 1) were missing on the tracks that were out of order (and that info was included on all of the other tracks). Adding them in reordered the list properly & instantaneously. Thanks!
I wouldn’t mark the problem as “fixed” ;-)
I currently have the problem with one album and I can’t figure out how to fix it.
I tried emptying the “Album Artist” fields one by one but some of them keep coming back!
And each time that I remove it by selecting all tracks and then check the checkbox in Get Info, the next time I click on a column to sort on, iTunes fills the Album Artist field back in… The only thing that helps is displaying the track number column and manually sorting on that… This is very annoying!!!
Matthias
Go to “View” up above and click “View Options” uncheck the box that says “checked” and you should be good to go.
This problem can be tricky, and you may have to go through track by track and see what is different about the track that won’t sort.
For example, I just made sure everything matched, and it still wouldn’t sort. Then I saw that the track that wouldn’t sort had “Disk 1 of 1″ set, and the other tracks didn’t. Once I removed that everything sorted correctly.
I had this problem as well and the above fix didn’t work so instead of just checking the Album Artist field I checked all the fields that I didn’t need / want such as genre, grouping, comments etc that fixed it for me – hope that helps someone!
All my tracks were the same in the album artist and disk fields, but the problem “fixed” itself when I ed through the entire album.
This worked! I had a compilation of songs and had painstakingly applied track numbers to each (which had been deleted). I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t sorting by track number. This was exactly it, thank you!
Sometimes one or more of the tracks gets a custom sort name (Sorting tab) and that throws out the sort order.
I need to put info in the Album Artist Field as it helps to group compilations together when viewing in cover flow. The track order is only correct using the Album By Artist field though as the Album Artist field lists compilation tracks alphabetically.
Well, When I sort my music by Album, everything is 100% fine. Like all songs ANYWAY. But when I sort it by Album Artist, (which is the best one I reckon). It goes all in the wrong order. I try loads of stuff, I even change my “sorting” for most of them. But its really annoying and there is no diffence between them GRRR!
This works, thanks. Weirdly there was nothing in the Album Artist field either, but by ticking the box next to it I fixed the problem. If it doesn’t work, check that the track numbers are correct and there are no differences in Artist either.
Had a playlist with 100 songs and also had this problem. Your trick fixed it though. Thanks.
Thanks! this problem was driving me mad!
One more thing that was causing the sort order to mess up for me was that one track (#3 out of a 10 track album), in the “Get Info” pop-up had the “Disc Number’ fields filled in or partially filled in, while the other tracks did not. Track #3 was appearing below track #10 until i cleared the track number field. So the basic take away is that you should clear all fields you expect to be empty as a straggled data point might be there throwing off the sort order. Thanks for this string that gave me the inspiration to find that derivative
I found out the problem when I was trying to sort by Album then track number. Some had “Album Artist” as an included field which messed it up – separate from the viewable artist. When I got rid of it the problem was fixed.
Ok never mind. I miss read the instructions. Way to go – you’ve got it right! :)
try Ctrl+a on entire collection, select Info; Disc 1 of 1. press ok. wait for it to complete. Now u sort it “album by artist”
hope it helps..
Solved my problem perfectly! Thank you!
iTunes 9 has a SORTING tab when you GET INFO for a song. This is where all SORTING issues can be resolved.
The compounding issue I experienced when trying the aforementioned recommendation of deleting ALBUM ARTIST info on INFO tab is that this removed the associated artwork for some of the songs and replaced it with other song artwork with no rhyme or reason (or at least none that I could figure out).
My recommendation:
1) On INFO tab, ensure all information is accurately entered for NAME, ARTIST, YEAR, ALBUM ARTIST, TRACK NUMBER (# of #), and ALBUM. I have not thoroughly tested it, but I’m guessing that all other fields on the INFO tab can be filled out as well.
2) TRACK NUMBER is important because it tells iTunes the order of the tracks on the album.
3) On SORTING tab, delete ALBUM ARTIST info. For me, iTunes had automatically filled out NAME, ARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST and ALBUM. So I had to simply delete the ALBUM ARTIST info only.
4) Repeat steps #1 thru #3 for all songs in playlist and click OK.
5) Test the results by clicking on the ALBUM column. iTunes will rotate between ALBUM sorting, ALBUM BY ARTIST sorting, and ALBUM BY YEAR sorting.
For me, this is my desired outcome, which I achieved following the above:
- When I select ALBUM sorting, playlist will display songs in correctly sort by track number, starting with track 1 at the top.
It’s amazing that new comments have been posted to this thread for over a year. Hope my experience helps someone else in the future.
None, zilch, zero, nada, of your suggestions worked on “Kevin Yost Presents … Vol. 5″.
i had the same problem but all fields were the same. the sorting order was the same across the entire album too. i tried emptying the album artist field to no avail. what finally got it for me was going through and erasing all track numbers, then manually re entering them 1 by 1. when i then clicked sort by track number, then resorted by album, they were fixed! hope this helps
This seems to be an interesting problem. Different people have solved it with different solutions. What seems to be the basic idea is that altering the data in some way, shape or form tends to fix the problem. Is it that something is triggered in the iTunes database when the information is changed?
Ah, my problem was that, I let iTunes to sort my albums in my music folder, by Album by Artist. For some reason my tracks didn’t have this fielf filled in, so I did that and voila! All is good again!
field*
Hey guys, i has the same problem.
Click another tab at the top to sort, like ‘name’ for instance
then click the ‘album by artist’ tap at the top and it should sort it’s self back to normal (right click the tabs up the top and select ‘album by artist’ if it is not on your itunes)
geez, imagine my surprise when I search for a solution to this problem and the first result comes with a screenshot of the exact album I’m listening to and trying to get to appear in the correct order…
thanks, your solution worked
Problem: On a few tracks i need to leave the Album Artist information in; therefore in the main library, when i click on Album, sorting by Album still does a secondary sorting by Album Artist, which screws up the track order on some albums. None of the solutions listed above seem to deal with this issue.
Solution: If you would like to leave in the Album Artist information, but do not want itunes to use this information in the sorting process, do this:
1. Highlight ALL tracks (you can do this all at one time, or in batches). You can, of course, pick and choose but I chose to make it universal.
2. Cmd-I to go to the Multiple Item Information box; Click on “Sorting”
3. In the “Sort Album Artist” box, type anything you want. (I typed in “Don’t sort by album artist” just as a reminder as to what i had done). It actually doesn’t matter one bit what you type in, as long as every track contains the exact same thing. This way, anytime itunes automatically sorts by Album Artist, the result will have absolutely no bearing on the sort because all Album Artist information will theoretically be the same (as far as itunes’ sorting mechanism is concerned), and the next in line for the sorting action should be the disc/track numbers.
Hope this helps – it cleared up an age-old problem for me.
I ran into not being able to sorty by track # and in my case if I simply selected to order by “Artist” (which for a given album is typically the exact same value since the album was produced by a single artist) this magically re-sorted the album back into track # ordering.
I have a playlist with in it one album.
I added track number before the song title. This number then appears in the track number column.
Clicking on the title header sorts correctly.
Clicking on the track number give a random order! The bad thing is that the songs appear in the same random order on my iPhone.
None of the suggestions above helped!
Are the people of Apple reading his?
Finally fixed the problem by updating the disk values on all the tracks to be the same. Either empty or an actual number. Undid it to verify it and it worked.
Finally fixed the problem by
1) Highlighting all the tracks
2) Right-clicking and selecting “Get Info”
3) Updating the disk # to 1 of 1 for all the tracks.
To tested my solution, I undid it and it reverted back to the original problem.
I finally figured it out! None of the above tips worked, many of my albums were “compilations of mixed artists”. And each track (in an album) had different, itunes called “albumartist”. I selected ALL my songs in itunes, “cmd + a” and then “cmd + i”, select the field “albumartist” checkbox, with “blank” info, then OK, sort again, FIXED!
Thank you so much! I was going insane!
Brilliant. Worked a treat.
I know this is an old post, but…
Thank you for the tip. I think I know what is going on now.
When iTunes doesn’t sort the songs correctly, there is some information within the songs that makes iTunes think they are not of the exact same album. Sometimes it’s the “Album Artist”, but it could be something else. Probably would be helpful to check the info for a song that doesn’t comply to see what field actually is causing the problem.
Hope this adds to the discussion.
At first I thought it did not work but all I had to do was do the above instruction and then actually play song with track no. 1 and all the other songs would rearrange :)
The albums that fail for me are Spamalot and SouthPark:Bigger,Longer,Uncut.
Every track has different artists (Kyle & Cartman, Satan and Saddam, Kyle’s Mom (the Bitch)) and this seems to prevent the album from playing as an album.
I’ll try some of the suggestions here, see what happens.
For albums that contains songs from different artists, this might help: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1468
AWESOME! Thank you, I was getting so frustrated. This worked perfectly for me.
GENIUS! It worked! Thanks… now I can listen to my Tool albums in sequence.
It didnt work all of my songs are even more out of order, they are all from a cd i bought and I checked everything and each song contains the track number, artist, album, genre and song name. This happened to two of my Cd’s help!
Very helpful, fool-proof guide to solving the problem of track listing I faced! I followed it step-by-step and all is now right with the itunes world! Thanks for taking the time to help folk like me!
HERE IS A FIX: GO TO THE COLUMN TASK BAR AND RIGHT CLICK…CHECK VIEW TRACK NUMBER. THEN SORT BY ALBUM AND IT SHOULD BE DONE. YOU CAN THEN UNCHECK VIEW TRACK NUMBER, BUT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE FIXED BY THEN.
THAAAAANNNNKKKKK YOUUU!!!!
This didn’t work for me, but I found another solution (sorry if a repost, tl;dr replies)
Simply Click “View > View Options” (or cmd+J) and then the top option is “View by”. Simply choose by track no. and tada!
Is there any way of deleting the iTunes track # itself from the play lists? When I copy my songlists into an external drive to put in my phone music player, the title of the song includes the track#. Once in my phone, I can’t even search for the title of a song, because it will have the track number in front, ex: 01 What about Love. Thanks for any suggestions
I tried what you said as it doesn’t work… It doesn’t do anything it’s still not arranged properly.