Why does itunes reorder tracks

Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Mark Harris. Mark Harris is a former writer for Lifewire who wrote about the digital music scene and streaming music services in an easy to understand, no-nonsense manner.

Updated on November 13, Jon Fisher. Lifewire Technology Review Board Member. Article reviewed on Nov 05, Tweet Share Email. Again, I'm open to ideas as to why it's the way it is, I'm all ears. However, considering that iTunes isn't the best example of software engineering, I wouldn't be surprised if there is something not ideal about the current implementation. And finding the cause of a potential issue is the first step towards improvement.

I know some people have experienced this issue, I've seen feedback on other sites, so I'm not alone. Perhaps there is another way to solve this issue.

We currently have custom sort fields for "Album", "Album by Artist" and "Album by Year" I wonder if Apple could introduce a new sort criteria such as "Album by Date added". I just grabbed a new cd and imported it into itunes and when sorting by date added the tracks are NOT listed alphabetically by id3 track name.

Track numbers go 3,1,2,4,5,6,8,7,9,11,12,14,13,,15,16, It's definitely not going out of it's way to import based on id3 data. I tested this with file copy turned on and off, by importing a folder, selecting all files in bulk, and selecting the files in the finder in the correct order.

I'm assuming the import order is just a result of how the file system decides to hand off the files to applications, which may be documented somewhere, or based on how new data get written to the iTunes library file from a buffer somewhere.

If I don't import the file that would otherwise be imported first, the import order of all the files changes dramatically. If other DAM apps can import based on filenames without any performance hit then I'll agree it's strange iTunes wouldn't. But even for as bad as iTunes is it seems strange that they'd purposely come up with some off-the-wall ordering system that isn't done explicitly to improve how it determines gapless playback or works with Genius or something else it might be doing under the covers, or it's just taking the data as-is from the FS, which is probably happening in a predictable way we all know things don't happen on PCs randomly, so there's an explanation somewhere.

But in the end I just think it's strange to expect a group of unordered files from the finder to end up ordered in iTunes simply based on how they were imported; playlists let you order things as precisely as you wish so at the very least there's been a solution this whole time.

As far as sort by album date added, I can get on board with that. I've been asking for the past 4 versions for more album-aggregated functionality. Especially smart playlists that can pull in entire albums based on average rating a statistic that seems to be available now in hybrid view , so you never know. I've never seen this. This has stayed completely consistent over more than CDs' worth of importing.

Sorry, it wasn't a physical cd, just a rip I downloaded. Why ever not? It appears that iTunes already scans every file in an import group before starting to actually import them, or at least the modal dialog that appears when you drag in a bunch of songs suggests this. What it's actually doing here is highly mysterious though, and it's surely an issue when it takes a bunch of computer geeks on a technology forum to work out what the final ordering is.

It's not a specific order that I'm after, it's a sensible one. But if you drag in a bunch of albums, you probably conceive of the albums as discrete entities, and might be surprised when iTunes mysteriously disregards the albums' track order, and even interleaves tracks from a variety of albums. A lot of this comes down to how iTunes treats the "track" as the principal unit, which is not always how people think about their music.

Sorry, but you really need to go out of your way to get iTunes to sort by something other than artist, then album, then track number.

Will sorting by date added do it? No, but no one ever said it would, and very few people either expect it to or rely on to organize their library.

If you drag in a bunch of album and you want them sorted by album and track number, it can do that. There are so many easy ways to actually accomplish what you're tying to do rather than just hoping for a different arbitrary happenstance than what currently exists.

Import order matching file structure is just as arbitrary as date created, or date modified, or file type, or size, or location on disk. Someone probably has a reason to want all of them, which is why the app provides a robust way of sorting songs pretty much any way you want. This is getting interesting. It looks like iTunes presorts the tracks before importing the files. This presorting is visible to the user, you can see the tracks "greyed-out".

I tested many times and sometimes the order was by alphabetical ID3 track, but other times the ordering seemed arbitrary. Could it be that iTunes is prioritizing performance? But why does iTunes bother presorting? And why does iTunes sometimes presort by ID3 track name? And finally, would it hurt if iTunes presorted by filename?

Below are 3 tests. In the first test iTunes presorts by alphabetical ID3 track name. In the other 2 tests, the ordering appears random. Finally, notice the tracks that appear in black. In every test, after the presorting, the tracks start appearing one by one by filename sequence, 1,2,3,4,5 etc. This would suggest that iTunes processes files alphabetically by filename.

If so, why does the presorting sequence vary in all 3 tests? Note that there is a whole bunch of sort fields available for every song. You could co-opt one of these and put [date][time][track] in there and then sort on that field. Another way to go: create a new playlist "happilysorted" and a smart playlist "notsortedyet".

For the smart playlist, have it select anything that isn't in "happilysorted" and sort "notsortedyet" on album with the import date clearly visible. Then simply drag albums from "notsortedyet" to "happilysorted" one at a time in import order and you'll have your sorted playlist with only one multiselect and one drag per album. The thinking is that Apple will generally do things in a more user-friendly way if possible, even if it makes things not literally true according to the labels.

Is it important that sort by date is correct to the second? Then, select the first layer of sorting with the same options available as with Artists.

Next, the Albums section lets you pick a second layer of sorting. This lets you really drill down on how this section is sorted, and again, adjustments here change the sort order right away. Songs : This section truly lets you take control of the options you see and how you can sort.

Start at the top by selecting the main sorting order. You can then choose to see categories under music, personal, stats, and file.

Plus, you can adjust the sorting and other miscellaneous categories towards the bottom. Since there are a lot of details available for the Songs section, take your time and check the boxes for what you really want to see.

Genres : The Genres section has similar options as Artists.