If there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s the fact that iTunes displays songs by Name first and THEN by Artist. You can rearrange ALL other fields except the one for Artist. My overwhelming preference is to see the who sings the song first and then see what it’s called. The other way around drives me crazy. I have scoured the Internet in order to find a solution to this problem. Message boards and forums are filled with people seeking the answer to this same problem, and never any solutions. Until now. Check it out:

As you can see, the Artist is on the left and then the name of the song to the right of it. Yes, the columns are labeled incorrectly, but that is FAR less irritating than having the song title displayed first. And no, I did not simply change the ID3 tag to have the title and artist switched. That would be a solution but with thousands of songs, nobody would want to go through that process.

UPDATE: It turns out that this script just changes the ID3 tags. LAME!

The Answer

This won’t work with Windows, but it definitely works with Mac. Here’s a link to an AppleScript:

Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes

Installation Instructions

iTunes Scripts for Mac OS X. To install AppleScripts for iTunes on a computer running Mac OS X, follow these steps:

*    Quit the iTunes application
*    Locate and open the iTunes folder in the Library folder in your Home folder
*    Inside this folder, create a new folder named “Scripts”
*    Place the script files in the newly created Scripts folder
*    Launch iTunes. An iTunes Script menu displaying the script collection will now be available in the menu bar

iTunes Scripts for Mac OS 9. To install AppleScripts for iTunes on a computer running Mac OS 9, follow these steps:

*    Quit the iTunes application
*    Locate and open the iTunes application folder
*    Inside the iTunes application folder, create a new folder named “Scripts”
*    Place the script files in the newly created Scripts folder
*    Launch iTunes. An iTunes Script displaying the script collection menu will now be available in the menu bar