Since iPods do not allow one to sort albums by year, only alphabetically, I am trying to figure out a way to change the album tag to include the year. Does anyone know of any programs of processes that would allow me to do such a thing?

For example, if I have 15 albums by the same person, and they all have the album and the year filled in on the tag, is there a program that would allow me to change the album tag to the following format...

[Year] - Album Name

If there is a program that does this, how do I then import these new tags into iTunes? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'd very much rather not do this by hand.

-Jim Jones
The People's Temple

Assuming you have the year in a tag field and simply want to change the album name field to include year at the beginning, you can easily do this. Foobar 2000 masstagging options would allow you to do this. I think you could also do this with MP3TAG program and the appropriate script.

Not sure about iPods, but iTunes now does what you want with V7. Select an artist, then click the Album column until it displays "Album by Year". That artist's albums are now sorted by year.

..and if you're struggling with Foobar, MP3TagStudio (available from magnusbrading.com) will also do what you want.