Oh great, more screwing up from Apple

[pseydtonne]

I made the mistake of upgrading my installation of iTunes to the latest (7.3.1). Guess what suddenly doesn't work? Sorting albums by title!

iTunes used to use ASCII order, which is normal for a computer program. This meant certain punctuation (such as the exclamation point) moved to the top of the stack. This was fine for me because it put The Dismemberment Plan's first album ("!") at the top of the stack.

Suddenly I see "A Hard Day's Night". Okay, so where's that DP album? Oh, it's no longer a single album! It's cut with the Sigur Ros album "()" (parentheses) and some other random crap.

Some of this is explicit in the notes from Apple's web site. However, they now neglect that some things have weird titles with no words or numbers at all. I wouldn't mind inverting my album stack order if that worked. Instead I just wind up with a jumble I can't seem to understand.

Dang it, Apple fools! No wonder the Beatles have to sue your asses for misuse of the name Apple every so often. If you fuck with my indie music collection, I will start using Winamp plugins instead!

Now I have to research a solution. Later...

-by the way the resume looks almost polished, Ps/d

Addendum: Changing the title from '!' to '! ' or even '"!"' changed nothing. I can't find my albums! I took some screen shots of the stack to show you the jumble that gets my panties all twisted versus desired order (sorted by artist).

This is a major trigger for my OCD. I can't even sync my iPod again until I figure out a fix to this problem.

Second Addendum: I changed the DP album to read "! [bang]" and the Sigur Ros album to read "() [parentheses]". It's a little nutty to have the word parentheses in brackets.

Comments

[tkitch.livejournal.com]

The update also made some VERY smart changes I was waiting for, such as ignoring words like "THE" at the beginning of an album title.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but they still broke other things to fix the one thing.

It also means "A Perfect Circle" moved from A to P, which annoys me.

Yeah, it's a workaround but

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I believe the solution is in fact right at the bottom of the page you link to.

1. Get Info on a song and click the Sorting tab.
2. Enter the text in the appropriate sorting field. If you want "The Beatles" to sort by "The Beatles" instead of "Beatles" you would enter "The Beatles" in the Sort Artist Field.
3. Click OK.
4. To apply that change to all of the songs by "The Beatles", right-click (or Control-click) the song that you just changed and choose Apply Sort Field > [relevant field] (using the example above, Same Artist).

So enter some alt text for the albums (e.g., you could alt-text ! as bang or exclamation or 1111111 depending on where you want it). The Sorting tab rocks now.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

That only seems to apply to alphabet characters, not the rest of ASCII. Try it and you'll see.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I did try it, and it worked fine.