The Dead Part of You

I posted this as a comment over on Karl's blog, and he said it worked, so I'm giving it the front page treatment here:

The multiple artist in a iPod glitch is a pain in the ass. Here’s what I figured out a few months ago.

During an iTunes upgrade (I believe from 6.x to 7.x) there was a major change in how your library was sorted. If you right-click on an individual track and “Get Info”, you’ll now notice a tab that wasn’t there before - “Sorting”. This is now how your iPod now sorts it’s artists: no longer by Artist Name, but Sort Artist Name.

The point of this was now, I can file “50 Foot Wave” under “F” and have it still read as “50″ on the iPod. It can read as “David Bowie”, but be filed under “Bowie, David” like a record store.

During the upgrade, iTunes “re-indexed” all of your artist tags, filing things in multiple places (Chet Baker under both “C” and “B”, indefinite articles like “A” and “The”). The way that I’ve found to fix this is to select all of an artist’s songs in iTunes, right-click and select “Apply Sort Field --> Same Artist”.

This fixes it for me, but there’s probably an easier way, or at least some sort of automated hack that can be plugged in to do it for you…