Sorting music files by date in Windows 7
Windows 7 comes with many features enhanced for multimedia. One of these is that in Explorer, when a folder contains audio files, such as MP3, the columns in list view are optimized for sorting multimedia content. Specifically you will see the following columns:
- Name
- Contributing Artist
- Album
- # (track number)
- Title
In varying order. Categories, typical to lists in media players. Cool for people listening to music. But potentially annoying for music creators!
Since I produce music files in the same manner that I produce Word documents, I want to sort them in a way that makes my work easy. In particular, I simply want to sort my media files by date to easily know which one is the newest and probably the best version of a track I’m working with. Of course, you can always add the “Date modified” column by a few right clicks here and there. But doing this in each project folder I’m working in simply makes you hate this “upgraded” features, knowing that it used to be simpler.
Solution
Fortunately, there is a way to revert to the generic sorting columns. Assuming all your music folders are within a generic music folder, you can do the following.
In the generic music folder (“D:\Music” in this example), within Explorer, right click in a blank space to show Explorer’s popup menu and select “Customize this folder…”
Customizing folders in Windows explorer to change the sorting categories.
In the window that will appear, look for the “Customize” tab. Under the “What kind of folder do you want?”, “Optimize this folder for”:, change the dropdown selection from “Music” to “General Items”. Check “Also apply this template to all subfolders” so that every folder within your music collection will now show the following “traditional” columns we all grew up with:
- Name
- Date Modified
- Type
- Size
Select “General Items” and check “Apply to all subfolders” to remove the special treatment in your multimedia files.
If you have planned ahead before creating your folders, it would be a good idea to separate your audio files for listening (e.g. downloaded audio), and audio files that you create. This way, you can apply different folder settings and still benefit from Windows’s enhancements.
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