iTunes sorting strategies

Earlier this month, Apple released an upgrade to iTunes, and among its new features is the addition of several track information fields for customizing the sorting of albums and artists in iTunes. I’ve become somewhat of a perfectionist in my iTunes Library over the years — trying to ensure that every track has the correct and complete information — so after installing this update, I decided to finally straighten out the sorting.

After reviewing what I didn’t like about the sorting iTunes provided out of the box, I realized that there were patterns and strategies that I’ve come to use as I’ve entered track information and would need to follow in order to keep things consistent. I’m writing now to create a handy reference to refer back to, and to share with anyone who may be interested in doing a similar thing.

Here are the things I didn’t like about iTune’s default sorting:

1. For soundtracks, I enter the Album as “Pulp Fiction” (including the quotes). Unfortunately, this placed all of the soundtracks at the top of the album list.
2. Although iTunes omits “The” from sorting, other articles (such as “A” and “An”) are not.
3. Artists are sorted primarily by their first names, not their last names.
4. Artists with titles (such as “DJ”, “Dr.”, “Grandmaster”, “Little”, “Major”, “MC”, “Reverend”, “Uncle”, etc.) are sorted by these titles.
5. Numbers are sorted by their numeric value, not their spelling — so Foreigner’s 4 album is not next to the album Four by Blues Traveller.
6. Punctuation, unusual characters and abbreviations, when present, can negatively affect the sort.

So I started down the list, artist by artist, and began populating the Sort Artist field in the hopes of having iTunes sort my music as I would. Now that it’s done, it’s working great.

What follows are examples and explanations about how I enter the Sort Artist information for specific types of artists.

Individual artists

When entering the Sort Artist text for individual artists, I generally use the format of “[last name] [first name] [middle name/initial or title]”. For example:

• “Huey Lewis” is “Lewis Huey”
• “Andrew Lloyd Webber” is “Webber Andrew Lloyd”
• “Bobby “Blue” Bland” is “Bland Bobby Blue”
• “Mary J. Blige” is “Blige Mary J”
• “Sammy Davis, Jr.” is “Davis Sammy Junior”
• “Notorious B.I.G.” is “Notorious BIG”
• “Gilbert O’Sullivan” is “O’Sullivan Gilbert”
• “DJ DMD” is “DMD DJ”
• “Dr. Dre” is “Dre Doctor”
• “Uncle Dave Mason” is “Mason Dave Uncle”
• “50 Cent” is “Fifty Cent”

Multiple artists

In the case of multiple artists, I generally use a format of “[first artist] & [second artist]”. For example:

• “Jerry Garcia & David Grisman” is “Garcia Jerry & Grisman David”
• “Ike & Tina Turner” is “Turner Ike & Tina”
• “Neil Young & Crazy Horse” is “Young Neil & Crazy Horse”
• “Perry Farrell & D.V.D.A.” is “Farell Perry & DVDA”

Bands

In the case of bands, I strip articles and uncommon characters, spell out numbers when appropriate, and refer to my individual artist rules as necessary. For example:

• “*NSYNC” is “NSYNC”
• “.38 Special” is “Thirty Eight Special”
• “Ben Folds Five” is “Folds Ben Five”
• “A Tribe Called Quest” is “Tribe Called Quest”
• “Huey Lewis & The News” is “Lewis Huey & News”
• “Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats” is “Brenston Jack & His Delta Cats”
• “The Dave Brubeck Quartet” is “Brubeck Dave Quartet”
• “The Brothers Johnson” is “Johnson Brothers”

Feature requests for iTunes sorting

Going through this exercise for almost 3,000 artists gave me pretty good experience with the iTunes sorting features. For the most part, it was pretty intuitive, but there are a few areas where I think the software can improve.

First, once a value is entered for a Sort Artist, it would be nice if iTunes applied the same value when new tracks by the same artist are ripped. As it’s currently implemented, I need to remember to correct this each time I rip a new CD.

Second, when you start typing in a field, iTunes anticipates what you’re typing and provides statement completion, suggesting previously entered values that match what you’ve typed so far. This is nice, but when the match starts with the same letters in a different case, as you continue typing, the case does not change. You need to keep an eye out for this, or you’ll have inconsistencies in your libary.

Finally, let’s say that you change “The B-52’s” from the default Sort Artist of “B-52’s” to “B Fifty Twos” and apply the sort field to all tracks by the same artist. If you later discover that this was a mistake and wish to revert back to the default, doing so apparently requires that you delete the custom entry for each track, one by one. It would be far more convenient to apply the change across all related tracks with one action, like you can when entering a custom value.

Next steps

So that’s my Sort Artist story. I think it’s chapter 1 of a larger project, because I plan to keep improving my track information over time. It’s not a small project, so I’ll end up doing it a little bit at a time.

I’ll be updating the Sort Album and Album Artist fields next, and ensuring that only those albums that are compilations (e.g. contain tracks from different artists) are flagged as such. After that, I’m hoping to verify the genres for the tracks, and determine a strategy for associating more than one genre to each track (when appropriate). Genre on its own is pretty limiting (for example, I don’t consider soundtracks or holiday music to be genres). I think I’ll use genre for a high level classification by artist, but I’d prefer to have multiple style and theme values available at the track level as well. This should give me great capabilities with smart playlists.

Once that’s all done, the next big push will be determining how to populate the beats per minute field for each track, which seems like great information to have available when building music to exercise to.

If you’ve come across this article and have done or are planning to do similar work to your iTunes Library, leave a comment, and let me know about it! I’d love to hear your strategies, what has worked well, what hasn’t, etc.

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