iPod: Sort Your Albums by Year of Release
By tunequest April 17, 2008
The iPod’s default behavior is to sort alphabetically.
Here’s Daft Punk’s albums:
Discovery (2001), Homework (1997) and Human After All (2005).
Not that long ago, I was asked by a commenter if among other things, I had any suggestions for getting the iPod to sort albums chronologically. By default, the iPod’s behavior is to sort albums alphabetically by title. In iTunes, there’s the option to sort “Album By Year” but the iPod features no such function.
At the time, I didn’t have much of an answer for him other than to put the albums in a playlist and just listen to the songs in chronological order since the iPod doesn’t appear to keep track of the year data. But in an interesting twist, no sooner had I written the reply than Apple released version 1.3 of the firmware for 5G iPods, which after some further discussion, yielded this trick:
The most noticeable change in firmware 1.3 is the application of iTunes’ “smart sorting” (ignoring “a” “an” and “the”), including recognition of iTunes’ custom “Sort Fields” (Sort Album, Sort Composer), for Album and Composer. The Sort fields allow you to enter any text that you want and iTunes/iPod will use that to order the list of items, while displaying the text from the actual field.
Using the Sort Album field, you can easily put albums in whatever order you like. For example, you could put the Halo number of Nine Inch Nails releases in the Sort Album field to have all items, including singles and remix albums, displayed in the order they were released.
For basic chronological sorting, just put the year in the Sort Album field and voila, the iPod will show the album title, but they will be ordered by the year. For this demonstration, I’ve selected Daft Punk’s three studio albums:
- Homework (1997)
- Discovery (2001)
- Human After All (2005)
As you can see in the image at top, the default behavior is to simply display the albums in alphabetical order, with Discovery as the first. How do we fix that?
- In iTunes, get info on the first song of the album.
- Click the Sorting tab.
- Enter the year of the album into Sort Album field
- Click OK.
- Select all the songs on the album
- Right-click/Control-click and select Apply Sort Field > Same Album
- Repeat for as many albums as you care to customize
When you next update your iPod, the new data will take effect and the albums will be sorted by release date.
Daft Punk albums sorted chronologically.
This process works for any 5G iPod that has been updated to firmware version 1.3 (and I assume iPods/iPhones released subsequently) So if you haven’t updated yours, hop to it and then get customizing.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Thanks!!
Now just to sort Live, Studio & compilations together some how.. =)
June 21st, 2008 at 12:35 am
This has totally goofed my albums (artist has more than one album in the same year). How do you undo it?
tunequest Reply:
June 21st, 2008 at 8:52 am
To undo it, simply repeat the above steps, but instead typing something into the Sort Album field, delete it.
If you know the order that the albums were released, you can always change the sort order to a more specific scheme:
Like a date: 2008-04 (for April 2008)
or release order: 2008-B (for the second album released that year)
etc
June 26th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Thanks. That’s exactly what I did initially but, in iTunes and on my iPod, it did not completely ‘undo’ the resorting of the albums; albums (all in the same year) were not being grouped together both on my computer and iPod. After restarting iTunes and doing a soft reset on the iPod, however, the ‘undo’ was applied completely and everything was back to how it was before I tried to show the albums sorted by year.
Still not sure why the sorting didn’t work though. Would be interested in what anyone else finds - try applying the ’sort’ as described above for multiple albums that came out in the same year by the same artist (e. g., Elton John’s Madman Across the Water and Tumbleweed Connection both came out in 1971; when I applied this they appeared in the entire album structure in the appropriate place by year but the songs from the two albums were mixed together - there were other examples as well).
July 6th, 2008 at 9:35 am
it didnt work for mine. mine is a 30gb video ipod. i tryed the above hint for all of H.I.Ms cds…
i put all of darklite at 2005
Venus Doom cd at 2007 etc etc
and it still shows up alphabedically.
is there anything im missing? i put it in the sort feild like u said, followed the steps and made sure everything for each cd matched….
if u could reply, thanx
tunequest Reply:
July 9th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Hi Jason. I can think of two things that might be wrong:
1) make sure you’ve applied the latest firmware update. It can be accessed from inside iTunes on the screen that appears after you plug in your iPod.
or
2) It should have done this automatically, but try erasing the songs from your library then re-adding them after you’ve made the change. Maybe the updates didn’t make it to the iPod for some reason.
If those two items don’t work, you may need to try a hard reset (wipe everything and start over). And if that doesn’t work, it could just be that the feature isn’t supported on your model iPod.
Good luck.
jason Reply:
July 9th, 2008 at 8:32 am
ok, my ipod is at 1.3 and just yesterday i updated Itunes to 7.6 (dont know ifthat matters or not)
and erm…ive got a lot of songs >.<…that could take quite a while to redue everything
and im not sure what u mean by the first thing but do u mean to just wipe the ipod clean and then just re-copy everything over to it?
and sicne i updated itunes ive not tried it yet…. but im guan do that in just a second i guess
jason Reply:
July 9th, 2008 at 8:47 am
can you type out what your ipod looks like? i mean, do u have anything in any of the other slots for organization? and are all ur files at the same ID tag? does that matter?
OGM!!! I THINK IT WORKED!!!!!!
YOUR THE BEST PERSON ON THIS ENTIRE FREAKIN PLANET!!!!!!!
it sorta worked, its jumbled but ill fix it!! UR THE BEST THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!
jason Reply:
July 9th, 2008 at 9:13 am
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! its all amazing
and it was just a few minor weird things i had to change! THANKS SO MUCH
July 30th, 2008 at 1:59 am
What can I do if I have albums from different artists with the same name? For example, I have three different bands with “Live at the Fireside Bowl” and “MTV Unplugged” — how can I prevent them from all using the same year when sorting?
August 27th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Awesome tip. I can confirm it works perfectly on an iPhone 3G. Thanks so much!