I really like iTunes. In fact, after the first time I saw it running on a Mac I desperately searched for a similar application for Linux and almost considered writing one myself (not being 100% happy with Rhythmbox). I instantly knew that was the way I wanted my music organised. After my switch I find that, while good, iTunes is not perfect. My main problem with it is that while you can decide which column you want to order your music by, you can’t select which column it looks at when two songs have the same value in that column. For example, if you order by Artist it will order the songs by Artist, Album. This means that the albums by a certain artist will be sorted alphabetically, while I want them sorted by year. I find that that’s how I order the albums in my head, so it takes a while for me to find the album I’m looking for when they are sorted alphabetically.

The Solution

If you right click a column header in iTunes, you are able to select which fields are shown. My idea was to put the sort information I wanted into one of these fields. I settled for Grouping, since it’s one of the fields you can change when you edit the properties of a song. If I put the name of the artist followed by year and then by album into this field, sorting by this field should mean the songs are sorted the way I want them to be. Naturally, manually entering the information into this field would be quite tedious, so I wrote a quick Applescript to do it for me.

The Code

tell application “iTunes”
  if selection is not {} then
    repeat with this_track in selection
      set this_year to (get this_track’s year)
      set this_artist to (get this_track’s artist)
      set this_album to (get this_track’s album)
      if this_year > 0 then
        set this_track’s grouping to this_artist & “,” & this_year & “,” & this_album
      else
        set this_track’s grouping to this_artist & “,” & this_album
      end if
    end repeat
  else
    display dialog “Select some tracks first…” buttons {“Cancel”} default button 1 with icon 2
  end if
end tell 

Instructions

Copy and paste this code into a file (or download it here). Save the file to Library/iTunes/Scripts/ in your home directory (you might have to create the Scripts directory if it doesn’t exist). The script should now show up in the scripts menu in iTunes. Select a few songs and then select the script from the scripts menu. The songs’ artist, year and album should be written to the grouping field. To sort by this field, right-click a column header and click grouping in the list that pops up. Click the grouping header once to sort by this field. Done! To get easier access to this script you can bind it to a shortcut key, see here.

-Tomas Larsson