iTunes mini adding songs in reverse order...?

[glawrie]

Not really used it much before, but noticed tonight that when using iTunes mini to start playing 'an artist' it is adding their albums with the tracks in reverse order.  

I'm guessing that this is an unwelcome interaction between Alfred settings and iTunes settings, but can't work out how / what / where to go to fix it.

Any suggestions / guidance would be great.

Also - probably a forlorn hope - is there any way to get iTunes to play things from Alfred without creating a spam playlist?  Tedious to have to go and delete them periodically.

[Andrew]

@glawrie Interesting, I haven't heard of tracks being added in reverse order before, are you saying the playlist Alfred creates has the tracks added in reverse order? Is Shuffle turned on in iTunes?

 

Also, Alfred should only create one playlist, and this is needed for Alfred to define the tracks it wants iTunes to play. If multiple playlists are being created, it could be that you have playlist syncing turned on and iTunes isn't managing to sync the playlists quick enough causing a conflict resulting in multiple playlists. Are you syncing playlists to any devices or iCloud in iTunes?

[glawrie]

Sorry - I mis-spoke.  It is not reverse order it is actually some weird random-ish order that I don't really understand.  The event that finally got me to post a question was indeed apparently the creation of a list in reverse track order, but actually on deeper testing it seems Alfred is creating a playlist that has all the tracks for each album consecutively, but the tracks within each album and the albums appear in some kind of random order.  Shuffle is not turned on, and they do not appear to be being sorted by some unseen value (e.g. date).

 

Unfortunately it is hard to show this with pictures - as iTunes does not show track numbers in playlists (at least I can't get it to).  But the two here show part of the album / date order listing for a band on my system, followed by the playlist that Alfred generated when I asked it to play all the albums by that band (so itunes mini / artists / play all in alfred).  You can see the Alfred list is beginning with an album that is not 'first in the date list'.  If you check, you'll also see that the tracks from "The Bends" (the one Alfred is playing first) are in random order... 

 

I've checked, and shuffle is turned off in my copy of iTunes.

 

HTH

 

The multi-playlists thing?  Yes I'm syncing to several other devices, so I guess it might be a sync issue.

 

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by glawrie