On the Mini, I have my 500+ album collection organized exactly the way I want it: alphabetical, chronological, with the original cover art. And that was a lot of work for almost every album loaded into Music. Apple’s database doesn’t contain the original cover art of all albums, and many albums end up with the wrong cover, so I loaded dozens of cover images (Get Info/Cover/Add Cover). On my iPhone, some of the album cover images are randomly jumbled together.
An alphabetical example: I want my Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express albums to be sorted in the A ranks (Auger). I navigate to the Sorting tab in the Get Info window and enter “Auger, Brian” in the Sort As fields for Album Artist and Artist for each Oblivion Express album. Since two of my Oblivion Express albums were purchased digitally only from the iTunes Store, all of my Oblivion Express albums on my iPhone are obviously sorted in the B ranks. This happens for multiple artists.
And when I say chronological, I mean by recording date, not release date (if possible). That means Jimi Hendrix’s Radio One will sort before Electric Ladyland and Live at Woodstock will sort before Band of Gypsys. So for most artists with multiple albums, I navigate back to the Sorting tab and enter the recording year before the album name in the Sort As field for Album. For some artists with multiple albums in one or more years, it gets a little more complicated. For Hendrix, alphabetical sorting of tracks from the same year follows sorting by recording date, but that coincidence is rare.
My Frank Zappa collection is the most important to me and the one that is the most jumbled on my iPhone. Take 1972, for example; without any additional adjustment, The Grand Wazoo is sorted before Waka/Jawaka. I go by release date and enter “1972b The Grand Wazoo” in the “Sort As” field for “Album.” Then I enter “1972c Imaginary Diseases” in the “Sort As” field for this posthumous release. And I still haven’t figured out why about half of the Zappa albums are sorted in the F categories while the rest, including an iTunes purchase, are sorted in the Z categories.
There are also some albums purchased through iTunes where for some reason every single song shows up as an album on the iPhone, and the latest bug I discovered today involves a 3-disc compilation: Guitar Heroes. I loaded the discs as individual albums, which show up on the Mini under “Compilations” at the bottom of the album view. On the iPhone, this category is marked “?”, and one song on each disc was not synced (not allowed in my region?!?).
In the past, I have consolidated the individual song album entries by deleting all music files from the iPhone, deleting the Music app from the iPhone, reinstalling Music from the App Store, and then syncing to the Mini. However, syncing over 500 albums takes many, many hours, and subsequent purchases from the iTunes Store seem to break the album view on the iPhone. I am now in this hours-long syncing process between my recently fully updated devices, but I know that the most I can hope for is some consolidation.
