iTunes: Sort Artist and ‘Artist’ column in Browse view

Posted by Pierre Igot in: iTunes
September 10th, 2007 • 4:44 pm

In iTunes 7.1, Apple added the new “Sort Fields” feature, where you can use optional tags to force iTunes to use a sorting order different from the default one. For example, if you have a track whose Artist field contains “Peter Iznogood,” by default when tracks are sorted by artist, the track will be appear under the letter “P.” But of course the last name here is “Igot,” so the track should really be appear under the letter “I.”

The default tags commonly used for music tracks do not allow you to do this, unless you enter “Iznogood, Peter” in the Artist field—but even if you use this method systematically yourself, it’s not a universal convention and you’ll constantly encounter tracks (for example, tracks purchased from the iTunes Store) which do not use the convention.

iTunes’s “Sort Fields” are actually a pretty smart way to work around the limitations of the regular Artist field. It’s too bad that the UI for it is so awkward.

But even if you get past the awkward UI and actually use the “Sort Fields” feature, there are still a number of things to figure out. One of the key things is the actual connection between the Sort Artist field and the “Artist” column that appears in the middle of the top half of the iTunes window when you switch to Browse view (with the button with the eye symbol in the bottom-right corner).

To begin with, it really is not clear at all that there is a connection between the Sort Artist field and the “Artist” column in Browse view. After all, the column is labelled “Artist” and not “Sort Artist.” So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the column displays the contents of the Artist field and not of the Sort Artist field.

And in fact, it is technically true: the “Artist” column in Browse view always displays the contents of the Artist field. But what the iTunes interface does not tell you is that what the “Artist” column displays and what the “Artist” column uses are not one and the same.

The “Artist” column displays the contents of the Artist field, but if the track also has something in the Sort Artist field, then iTunes uses the contents of the Sort Artist field to determine the sort order of the artist. So for example, if I select a track whose Artist is “Peter Iznogood” and assign to it the Sort Artist “Iznogood, Peter,” the track’s artist will still be listed as “Peter Iznogood” in the Artist column in Browse view, but this “Peter Iznogood” will appear under “P” in that column!

This means that, if you have some tracks that have “Peter Iznogood” in the Artist field and nothing in the Sort Artist field, and then some other tracks that have “Peter Iznogood” in the Artist field and “Iznogood, Peter” in the Sort Artist field, then there will actually be two occurrences of “Peter Iznogood” in the “Artist” column in Browse view: one under “I” and one under “P”! And if you select one of the two occurrences, you will only see part of the tracks—i.e. either those tracks which have “Iznogood, Peter” in the Sort Artist field or those tracks which have nothing in the Sort Artist field.

If you want to unify things and make sure that all tracks by “Peter Iznogood” appear under the same artist listed in the “Artist” column in Browse view, then you need to make sure that all the tracks have the same thing in the Sort Artist field.

Things get even more complicated when you have an artist who collaborates with other artists. For example, let’s say most tracks by Peter Iznogood are by Peter Iznogood alone, but one track by Peter Iznogood is actually by Peter Iznogood and his brother. So you have “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother” in the Artist field for this track.

If so, then in the “Artist” column in Browse view, you will have two things: “Peter Iznogood” for the tracks whose Artist is “Peter Iznogood” only, and “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother” for the one tack whose Artist is “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother.”

Several years ago, Apple introduced yet another field called Album Artist. This is a field that lets you specify a single artist for an album, even though individual tracks on the album might feature the artist in question in association with other artists. (It’s a common occurrence in hip-hop, for example.)

Unfortunately, the use of the Album Artist field does not make any difference in the “Artist” column in Browse view. Even if you have put “Peter Iznogood” by itself in the Album Artist for the track whose Artist is Peter Iznogood featuring his brother,” the artist listed in the “Artist” column in Browse view will still be “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother.” It’s not very convenient, especially for hip-hop artists that work with a multitude of collaborators. Instead of a single entry in the “Artist” column in Browse view for the main artist, you still have an entry for each combination of that main artist with another artist.

Is there a way around this? Yes there is, and it involves the use of the Sort Artist field.

See, if you have a track whose Artist is “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother,” you can assign to it the Sort Artist “Iznogood, Peter.” If you do that, then this track’s artist will appear under “I” rather than under “P,” as expected. But there is another additional benefit, which as far as I can tell is not documented. If you have used the same Sort Artist, i.e. “Iznogood, Peter,” for tracks whose Artist field contains “Peter Iznogood” only, then as if by magic “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother” will no longer appear as a separate artist in the “Artist” column and instead will be merged with all other tracks whose Sort Artist is “Iznogood, Peter” and will be included under artist “Peter Iznogood,” appearing under “I” in correct alphabetical order.

Phew! It’s a “feature” that is rather tricky to explain in plain language, and it’s not all that straightforward to use, because you actually have to manually apply the “Iznogood, Peter” sort artist to each different combination of “Peter Iznogood” with a different artist in the Artist field. With the awkward UI mentioned above, this is unnecessarily painful, and would be much easier if you could just apply the same Sort Artist to a bunch of selected tracks, like you can do with other fields.

But if you can tolerate the awkward UI (or if you use a third-party AppleScript to work around the limitations of the iTunes UI, such as this one), then you can actually achieve a single entry in the “Artist” column in Browse view for all tracks involving the same artist, whether he is featured as a solo artist or as the main artist with a variety of collaborators. (I should also mention that this use of the Sort Artist field also affects the way artist names are sorted in the “Artist” column in the regular list view in iTunes, although it does not affect the way they are displayed in that column, like it does in the “Artist” column in Browse view.)

One thing that I haven’t been able to figure out quite yet, however, is how exactly iTunes determines how to display the Sort Artist in the “Artist” column in Browse view. After all, if you think about it, since iTunes uses the contents of the regular Artist field in that column, and since you can apply the same Sort Artist tag to tracks by different artists—in my example, “Peter Iznogood” and “Peter Iznogood featuring his brother”—which one of the two will iTunes use to display the (underlying) “Iznogood, Peter” under “I” in the “Artist” column in Browse view?

It might seem obvious to us humans that iTunes should use “Peter Iznogood,” but it is not necessarily obvious to iTunes. What criteria does it use to determine which one to choose? Does it automatically take the shortest entry in the Artist field? Or does it try to be more clever and find what is common to all these Artist entries that have the same Sort Artist?

I simply do not know.


3 Responses to “iTunes: Sort Artist and ‘Artist’ column in Browse view”

  1. frzappa says:

    As far as I can tell. The Artist’s name will be the name in the first track. So in your example if the first track is “Peter Iznogoood featuring his brother”, thats what will appear in the artist columne.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Thanks, but “first” in what sense? There are all kinds of different ways of sorting tracks (by name, by artist, by album, etc.), and there is no indication of which sort order takes precedence here.

  3. frzappa says:

    What you describe can be within one album or spread over diffenrent albums. In my case it was only one album. For the artist’s name it took what was in track Nr. 1.

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