iPod iPod Started Sorting "the" bands under "T" after update

[goodolgil]

160gb iPod classic.

Hi, last night iTunes asked me me if I wanted to update the software on the iPod. I did, but this morning noticed a weird change. Now all of the bands I have that begin with "the" are in alphabetical order under T(for example The Beatles, The Flaiming Lips etc.. are all now under "T" instead of "B" and "F" respectively) instead of the "the" part being ignored like it used to be. Another change is that any bands beginning with numbers or symbols are now directly at the top of the list instead of at the bottom.

Is there anything I can do about this (aside from deleting the 'the" from all the band names)? It is incredibly annoying to have 100+ "the" bands all clustered together under T. I can't imagine this is by design, especially since it's been one way ever since I've had an iPod (5+ years).

I also have the newest version of iTunes and manually manage the iPod.

I've tried to find help for this elsehwere by searching, but by its nature is a difficult issue to Google. I haven't been able to find anyone who had a similar problem, at least not recently.

 

[CTU Kyoto]

Every track in iTunes has Sorting tags (found inside the Get Info pane) that allow you to enter text that will be used to sort the track, while keeping the text displayed in the application separate. The way iTunes sorts titles or band names beginning with articles properly is to automatically detect them and fill the Sort Title/Sort Artist tag with the text of the title minus the article. Auto-generated sort titles of this sort are greyed out to indicate that the user did not enter them, but you can still edit or remove them.

It sounds like the update somehow caused the auto-generated sort tags to be lost. You should be able to just select all the tracks by each artist, Get Info for the multiple selection, then enter the name without the initial article in the Sort Artist tag (i.e. Beatles for The Beatles, or Flaming Lips for The Flaming Lips).

If you aren't familiar with the sort tags, you can use them to sort artist names by surname while keeping the display name in the right order. I have the Sort Artist tag for David Bowie, for example, entered as Bowie, David. You can also do this to sort unusual names containing symbols. Some examples from my collection are sorting David Bowie's album "Heroes" (the title actually includes the quotation marks) as Heroes so that it's sorted under H instead of at the bottom of the list with the numbers, and keeping the stylised title of the Justice album displayed as † while sorting it under the word Cross so I know where to find it.