iTunes Store Purchases Don't Download in Track Order

[jamesmcnee]

I just bought an album from iTunes and it downloaded the tracks in reverse alpha order.

The way I use iTunes most of the time is to keep my library sorted by "Date Added" and then scroll to the bottom and play the most recent albums.

When I import songs from a CD they arrive in track order.

I know there are workarounds like making and playing from a playlist or copying the tracks to my desktop, erasing the songs from iTunes then bringing them back -- one-by-one -- to iTunes, ... but they strike me as sort of PCeee -- not at all Maclike.

Any ideas why the iTunes store wouldn't download music in track order?

As a start it would be nice to be able to edit the order and date added field but ...

This problem seems pretty basic -- obviously I'm missing something.

I'm running iTunes 8.0.2 in a G5 with OS X 10.4.11

Thanks

[fracai]

Your machine queries the store for a list of available songs to download and adds them to a download queue. This queue may process up to 3 downloads at a time.

So you have the order that they're added to the queue and the order that they finish downloading to fight with. Because the songs will be of differing lengths and sizes, they may finish downloading out of order. There's also no guarantee that the songs will be added to the queue in order. iTunes may try to do something intelligent, like altering the order to maximize the use of your connection, but it may also be random.

My suggestion would be to turn on the Store link arrows and then use the defaults write command to invert the link direction, such that they point to your own library:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

This way you can still browse your "Date Added" list and click on the link next to the album name of the song you want to play. This will take you to the rest of the tracks in your library that are in that album. If you keep your library sorted by Artist or Album you'll then be able to play the tracks in sequence. I suggest creating a Smart Playlist, which grabs every track, that you can then sort by Date, without sorting your main library.