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21 November 2008

Whoever invented iTunes: your special circle of hell, let me show you it. (aka SHOUTING THREAD)[More:]
GAAAAHHHHH!

Two things happened today:

1. I received the Paul Weller at the BBC box set (four glorious discs, FOUR!), and...

2. I accepted the iTunes update.

Now, of course, when you download an album for the first time, iTunes (irritatingly) sorts by artist first name -- so these four new discs were automatically sorted under P (for Paul), rather than W (for Weller).

Previously in iTunes, I could select new (un-properly-sorted) material and sync it up with old (properly sorted) material: that is, I could choose old Weller tracks sorted by "W" and new Weller tracks sorted by "P" and tell them to match sort fields -- so they'd all go to W. (This was sort of a clunky option that wasn't well explained or particularly intuitive -- I mean, surely there's an easier way to do it, say by including "sort field" as an option when you select "get info" for more than one track! -- but fine. I lived with it.)

Evidently... not anymore. Because this time, when I went through the same routine I've been doing for the past couple of years, it changed every single one of my Paul Weller tracks -- all 366 of 'em (I know) -- to go back to sorting by P.

I have now spent the past hour trying to figure out a way to automatically return them once again to sorting by W, but I can't. Can't! Tried everything and I just can't bloody figure it out. I presume this means I'm going to have to change them all manually, one by one. AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!

I HATE iTunes hate hate hate stabby stab stab! If anyone has any solutions that don't involve me typing "Weller, Paul" 366 times (hello, Friday evening!), I would be most grateful.
(Oh, and I know that posts such as this make me sound like the music fan equivalent of a crazy cat lady. I promise I really do listen to other music... now and then.)
posted by scody 21 November | 04:20
Select all of your Paul Weller tracks. Right click and hit get info. Go to the "Sorting" tab. Under "Sort Artist," enter "Weller, Paul." Does that fix your problem?
posted by unsurprising 21 November | 04:42
That's assuming you're on a PC, running iTunes 8.0.2.20.
posted by unsurprising 21 November | 04:46
Well. A PC running Windows. Sorry. I'll stop with the posts. I hope it works out for you!
posted by unsurprising 21 November | 04:47
I could choose old Weller tracks sorted by "W" and new Weller tracks sorted by "P" and tell them to match sort fields

That's not how it works. You're meant to set up one track correctly, then right click just that track and select "Apply sort info" to "Matching artist". That applies the "Welller, Paul" sort artist from the first track to all "Paul Weller" tracks in your library. Why it's done in this absurd manner, I don't know.

So in essence the track(s) you select act as the source. By choosing all of the tracks as the source, it's purely the luck of the draw which info propagates to the others, so it was dumb luck that it seemed correctly before.
posted by cillit bang 21 November | 06:49
oh yes yes yes, death to iTunes and their "we know how to organize the track-labeling system that you made better than you!"

I would like to see media management software that lets you sort by tags.
posted by casarkos 21 November | 08:59
what unsurprising and cillit bang said
posted by terrapin 21 November | 09:41
unsurprising: nope, I'm running a Mac. If I select all Paul Weller tracks and right click to "get into", there is no "sorting" tab -- though what you describe is precisely how I would expect it to be done (and yet one more reason why I am vaguely disappointed in having switched to a Mac). There's no "sorting" option for multiple tracks -- only single tracks.

cillit bang: tried that too -- it just erases the "Weller, Paul" field for the one track (though the hard drive makes all sorts of noises like it's looking for the rest of the tracks, then gives up). But this leads me to wonder if there was actually a glitch in downloading this most recent version of iTunes, then...?
posted by scody 21 November | 12:11
fail || Currently cracking me up:

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