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Is there a way of sorting albums for an artist by year in iTunes?

For example: "Coda" is actually Led Zeppelin's last album, but it appears first for me in iTunes. I'd prefer it if it sorted albums by Year, so "Led Zeppelin" was at the top, followed by "Led Zeppelin II", and so on (and "Coda" was at the bottom).

Is this possible?

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

You can always use the keyboard shortcut "Cmd+J" to open the "View Options" window where you can select sorting mode.

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I simply enter the release date in the field Album Sorting in the format YYYYMMDD ie 20121224 and make sure that I sort by Artist - Year. Everything is sorted nicely :)

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You can change the Sort Album field in the Options tab of the song info. I once found a script that would change all the sort album fields to year and album name, and in some cases (the Beatles for example) I changed it to yyyy.mm.dd album name because they released multiple albums per year.

This should be the default sorting for all music players, I REALLY don't know why it isn't.

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I totally agree, Dan. It's confusing, isn't it? It's the default sorting for the Zune software, which is part of the reason why it grated so strongly when I switched to iTunes. You'd think that the leader in the field, especially one that used to be run by someone who loved music, would do a better job :-/ – Django Reinhardt Jan 8 at 10:56
up vote 10 down vote accepted

I've just found the answer! It's kind of hidden away, but it is possible:

Select "Show Menu Bar"...

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Then under View select "View Options..."

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A new window with View Options appears!

enter image description here

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Not sure if this is a problem with sorting by year or using the Artist panel in general: for albums without track numbers (Demo reels, etc) the order in which the tracks display is not the order that they play back. Has anyone experienced this? – RSully Nov 30 '12 at 0:55

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