iPod iRRitation
I have an iPod. I love it. I use iTunes. I hate it. But at the moment I can’t be bothered to figure out how to use anything different, so I’m stuck with it. It didn’t start out as an irritation… no, that came later during one of the “automatic” upgrades. It’s all about sorting.
As I write this I see that I have 7,683 items on my iPod at the moment. According to the status bar that’s enough to play every song or video once and once only and not have any repeats for nearly twenty two and a half days. That’s a heckuva road trip! 
The point is, I have a lot of stuff. And I like for my stuff to be organized. And organized using the proper rules.
With iTunes 7.2.something the artists were sorted correctly. That means that .38 Special was up at the top, along with 10,000 Maniacs and other “number” artist names. During one of the many updates Apple decided to change that. According to one article I read it was to be consistent with the way the iPhone did sorting. What, so, the iPhone is broken too? Let’s make everything sort wrong then…
Proper sorting order for music, books, movie titles… essentially anything you might find in a library… has numeric values going first, not last. In theory the number values should be sorted by number so “28 Days” comes before “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Both of those would come before 1,000,000 BC, except that in that case the movie title is actually spelled out in words as “One Million Years B.C.” so that means it is filed under “O” instead. With me so far?
The point is, Apple decided to change the sort order of my artists. All of a sudden .38 Special dropped out of sight! 
Turns out they were just demoted to the bottom of the list. The bottom of the list is where I expect to find ZZ Top.
It turns out there is a fairly simple fix, and it’s covered in this tech note from Apple. But even that doesn’t fix everything, as album compilations filed under “Various” seem to now want to float to the bottom of the list. It seems that ZZ Top is just not going to show up at the end, despite my best efforts. 