When I plug my iPod into my car it instantly starts blasting the alphabetically first song. The epitome of a “first world problem” perhaps but I (and many others apparently) find it terribly annoying and so someone developed a solution: 10 minutes of silence titled “A a a a a Very Good Song” you can download (for 99¢) just like if you purchased an actual song.
Clever but it doesn’t work for me. Why? I’ve checked the “sorting” in my iTunes library and it shows up first in all categories there.
What song do you get blasted by instead?
"Anphonic by “Above & Beyond vs Kyau & Albert” from a compilation album titled “Anjunabeats Vol. 8.”
What song comes first by artist?
What’s the artist name & album name of the “A a a a a Very Good Song”? Maybe change those fields to “A a a a” and try again?
I don’t know how to fix that particular problem, but somehow my iPhone is set up differently. Mine plays a random track and continues to play a different random track after the first one finishes. I have no idea how I managed to get it to do that.
Interesting. Yeah, mine just plays the first song by title alphabetically. Every. Single. Time. Annoying as all shit.
I really don’t understand why the default behavior is to start blasting the first song when the phone is plugged in. (Though I do note the OP mentions iPod and not iPhone, but seems the behaviors are the same with both devices.) There’s probably some rational explanation for it, but I don’t know what it is, and it’s been this way for years, at least with my Mazdas and my wife’s Kia.
My guess would be that the alphabetising algorithm is treating the space character as later sorting than the letters of the alphabet - thus a song title beginning ‘an’ will sort before ‘a[space]’
Try renaming it to ‘aaaaaa very good song’
“A a a a Very Good Song” is also the artist name.
I’ll try this (again, perhaps. I’ve fiddled with it off an on for 6 months without success."
what is meant by iPod? IPhone, Touch, Classic, etc.?
how is it connected? Bluetooth, Lightning, old chunky iPod connector, auxiliary?
Apple does ignore “a” and “the” for alphabetizing. Interestingly they don’t recognize Spanish, but Google Play ignores at least “Los.” I don’t know if they ignore all the a’s. I don’t know if anything is sorted before a, I know numbers are at the end for some reason. Underscore? Or something like aaaaab.
Also check all the fields on your computer: Artist and Album artist are different things. You might’ve missed one.
Depending on how many songs you have, it may or may not be feasible to keep hitting Next until the silence comes up, so you get an idea where they put it. It IS rather frustrating how my old iPod Classic would sort things differently than they appear in iTunes on the computer, so you’re not doing anything bad.
I use an iPod classic. It never occurred to me that it might sort songs differently than they’re sorted in iTunes.
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Interesting. That’s not quite the behavior I get when I plug in my iPhone to my car. The first song that plays is “A New Wave” (by Sleater-Kinney), which is the first song alphabetically, if you include “A” in your alphabetization. And when I go to my iPhone Music app and sort by song, it shows up first, as well. That said, I found deep down in my playlist, another song entitled “A Mindless Pop Song” that does get categorized under “M.” And all the titles beginning with “the” get the “the” ignored that I see. So there must be some metadata field that tells it when to pay attention to the “A” and when not to. And these are all songs purchased on iTunes with the metadata from there. No personal rips, no “shared” music downloaded from the web.
I think because you selected “random” at some point. I have the same situation. The part I don’t like is when it doesn’t restart in the same playlist. No, I don’t want to cycle through thousands of songs right now, I want to listen to my new music. :mad:
Yeah it’s obnoxious. I had one album where the tracks showed up in order in iTunes, but on iPod classic tracks 2 and 3 were switched. Never solved that.
Actually, it definitely ignores for artists (or did in the past), but I’m not sure about songs. I usually run those in the album order.
Like I said, it does for most songs, but not all. For some reason, “A New Wave” gets bumped to the very top of the list, and does not get filed under “N.” Meanwhile, “A Mindless Pop Song” does get filed under “M,” so there must be something in the metadata that classifies one as “A New Wave,” but the other as “Mindless Pop Song, A.” But I’m too lazy to check the fields right now on my desktop.
Hmmm…Interesting.
In iTunes on my Mac, if I sort by name “A Mindless Pop Song” is at the top of the list, followed by “A New Wave.”
In the Music app on my iPhone or iPad, “A New Wave” is sorted under the As, but “A Mindless Pop Song” is sorted under the Ms. I checked the metadata, and there is a “sorting” tab, but both titles show up with the “A” first there, for both the “name” and “sort as” fields.
Meanwhile, I see that the file “The Auctioneer” is properly sorted under the As, and in that one, the “name” file is “The Auctioneer” but the “sort as” field is “Auctioneer.”
So I am stumped as to the sorting discrepancy.