I think I'm understanding this right - does this mean that one would have to edit each artist one by one? Or is there a brute-force approach?

I selected all of the artists for the first Home album, pressed Command-I, and set the sort artist field. Then repeated for the other two. There's no way to do more than one album at once that I'm aware of.

-rob.

You should be able to use an Applescript to copy the artist into the sort album artist field. Doug's Applescripts (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/) has a variety of them. I know that there is at least one that lets you copy the contents of one field into another for a whole selection of tracks - you would only need to select the tracks you want to do this with, then run the script.

In the OP example, you could select all the tracks in all three Home albums and run the script once.

I've used Doug's "copy info from tag to tag" (whatever it's called--I've renamed it) script for years, but it has no provision for copying to the "Sort Album Artist" field. I wouldn't expect to find such a script, as Sort Album Artist is a non-standard tag, and was surprised to discover this:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=searchartmakesortart

If that doesn't meet the user's needs, then perhaps this will, as it was not stated that Album Artist would need to be kept intact:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=artisttoalbumartist

Heh, to me there is nothing obvious about what exactly those sort fields do in the info panels. Thanks for the tip.

I don't think this was obvious. The subtleties of how iTunes handles Artist, Album, and Album Artist (not to mention the sort fields for these various things) can be quite complicated. And it gets worse when you throw track numbers and disc numbers into the mix.

hi Rob,

if you click on the Album column header button, away from the reverse-order triangle, it will toggle the column sort between Album/Album by Artist/Album by Year. if you click the Album column reverse-order triangle, it will just reverse the sort order for the current state.

regards,

-mervTormel

That doesn't change the fact that the sort is wrong: it still makes Artist primary, not Album. I wanted to keep Album as the primary sort field, and Album by Artist doens't do that here (except on compilation albums).

-rob.

I too have several albums which share names. My solution is to change the album names to distinguish them.

It turns out that the album name sorting takes into account any trailing spaces. So I leave the first album alone, but add a trailing space to the album name on each track in the second album. If I get a third album, that gets two trailing spaces, and so on.

That way, iTunes treats them as different albums, even though the names look the same. And it works in all views, regardless of how you sort things.

If you put the Artist name in the "Album Artist" field, that will be used for sorting the Album.

The "Sort" field is only really intended if you want to change the sort order without changing the display - i.e. you could use it so that a band whose name is "Four Fingered Frank" is sorted as "4 Fingered Frank".

Not sure why you'd want to sort by album, *then* by artist, but you can probably avoid the grouping problem by just ensuring that the artist name is entered in both Artist and Album Artist.

You might also want to make sure the disc numbers are entered (it's usually 1 of 1, but iTunes can't assume that if it's not entered; it could be part of a multi-disc set), and Compilation is set to 'No' for all tracks.

There should be no need to manually enter anything in the sort fields. If all the info is correct and the albums still aren't grouping properly by artist, it's an iTunes issue that should be reported to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

I wanted to sort by album then by artist so that the three albums named 'Home' would be grouped by artist when I got to that section of the list...

-rob.

Please define "Home" album - As in "... I coded the artist of each Home album into the Sort Album Artist field on the Sorting tab of the Get Info (Command-I) dialog"