Mac Geekery

As it stands, the ability to sort one’s music in iTunes is a bit limited. True for most purposes, the built-in sort possibilities – sort by any other field (year, song title, genre, what have you) and the results are sorted within each discrete entry by artist and then album title – address the most common situations. But it is easy to imagine sensible and interesting ‘sorts’ that cannot be performed on one’s whole library quickly, such as:

• sorting by year and then by notes or grouping, in which Billboard chart numbers have been entered, to produce a Billboard chart of one’s library.
• sorting by artist and then by year to see a chronological listing of an artist’s work
• etc.

Any database or spreadsheet could easily perform the sorts of sorts envisioned, but iTunes, which in respect of its library is a sort of a database, cannot. Exporting the library from iTunes would allow the sorts to be done on a one-off basis with a bit of work, but it can’t be done in iTunes.

Regards,
Nick Chapman

codepoet Well, that’s kind of a doozy, really, because it’s more of a feature request for iTunes than something you can remedy. But, it’s not impossible. You simply have to resort to a trick used by programmers everywhere and create a sort key based on your sortable values. In this case, you would use AppleScript.

Find a tag you don’t use in any of your songs (grouping, comments, genre, etc.) and accept that you never will use it again, except for sorting. Then do something like this:

tell application “iTunes”

set theSongs to the selection —Get the selected tracks

repeat with theSong in theSongs

set theKey to ((the year of theSong as text) & “ “ & the name of theSong)

set the comment of theSong to theKey

end repeat

end tell