One final point: the default iTunes alphabetic sort is on the artist’s first name, not last name (that’s why Aaron Copland is near the top of my library). Apple added an option to specify how to sort a name (or artist or song title) a few versions ago, but they never updated their database to make this the default for artists who are people rather than bands. I made the effort on my home computer, but not on my work computer.

Yeah, it gets to be a lot of work.

On track numbers again, I don’t use iTunes to transfer files to my mp3 player or flash drive. I use Nautilus. Nautilus sorts by the file name, and in those files named with the number first it is a pain to sort through all the “01’s” and then “02’s” and so on down to the “17’s” to get the songs that I want moved over to the player or flash drive.

That is why I complain. And I complain a lot, rather than try to fix them.

So, yes … we fixed multiple authorship and broke commenting!!!!!! LOL!

Without the track number you have no way of knowing the order the songs appear on the album. I for one like listening to an album in the order the artists intended.

That rather depends on what music you’re listening to. Certain artists designed albums to be a coherent unit, with the songs heard in that order, and one song blending smoothly into the next. Dark Side of the Moon is a well-known example, and it arises frequently in classical music as well. Classical music suffers from a similar flaw as TV series in Netflix: the title of the whole multi-movement piece will come first, and the title of the movement will come at the end. Thus “Five Songs from Old American So…” (to take the first such example in my iTunes library) appears as the title of five consecutive tracks, and as this is one of the lesser known works of the composer in question (Aaron Copland) I can’t tell without clicking on the tracks which is which.

A related gripe: While most popular music is marketed by performer, most classical music is marketed by composer. But the “Artist” field usually contains the name of the performer, which for me is usually a secondary consideration. To get my classical music to sort by composer in my library, which also includes popular music, I have to move the performer’s name into the Comments field and put the composer’s name in the Artist field.

One final point: the default iTunes alphabetic sort is on the artist’s first name, not last name (that’s why Aaron Copland is near the top of my library). Apple added an option to specify how to sort a name (or artist or song title) a few versions ago, but they never updated their database to make this the default for artists who are people rather than bands. I made the effort on my home computer, but not on my work computer.