Tuneage

I've been using iTunes since it was introduced, and after all these years something still bugged me: I have quite a few instances where I have many albums by one artist, and I didn't know how to sort all the albums by an artist so that they appear in chronological order of release. (The default seems to be alphabetical by album title.)

My old friend Dr. Hackenbush (of the southern-central Hackenbushes) has always been a bit more under-the-hood with computers than me, so it finally occurred to me to ask him. The answer is so simple it made me feel kind of dumb, but it isn't necessarily obvious, so I thought I'd share the info.

In iTunes, if you click on the "Album" column, it will rotate through three different choices: Album, Album by Artist, and Album by Artist/Year. That third one is the one I wanted. If the metadata fields (the stuff under "Get Info") are not filled in with the correct info, those songs/albums won't be part of the sort, and will (I think) appear at the top of the artist listing, but you can fix that by going in and adding or correcting the info.

With the release of version 10, I've seen a lot of stuff online about how unhappy are with the program's appearance. It's not really an issue for me, but if you're feeling hacky and want to improve the look of iTunes 10, Cult of Mac has information on how to change the program's icon, return the window-control buttons in the top-left corner to a horizontal orientation, or just make the whole thing look like version 9 again.