iTunes Outsmarts Me Again

After what seemed like ages, I realized the Zen of Windows Media Player and managing a large library of music a few years ago.  It all comes down to the Album Artist - that field drives a lot of the functionality within WMP and if it isn’t set, stuff like automatic lookup of missing tags and sorting within Windows Media Center goes a lot smoother.  Plus, if an album has one or two tracks where there is a guest artist listed, the Album artist tag will still keep the tracks together, which was always my biggest gripe about iTunes.

When I saw iTunes finally added support for the Album Artist, I had hope.  Sorting on that column got me close, but compilations were still screwed up.  Even though the Album Artist tag was all the same, it would mix up the track order for those albums.  Then I found this little hint by click the “Album” column a second time which causes iTunes to sort albums by artist (my that is intuitive - <sarcasm>it’s like Apple is reading my mine</sarcasm>).  Now if they’d only update the iPod to support the album artist tag, I’d be happy.  I’ve got several compilation albums that end up crowding up the artist list (and if I turn on the “group by compilation” feature, it breaks the Acura MusicLink navigation in my car.)