I am trying to figure out a way to show the Album Track number on the left-hand side of the Media Player when displaying album tracks (rather than the arbitrary numerical order of the "playlist"). I've been trying to find a way to do this without having to develop another Media Player (that would basically be a clone of the native MP with a bit of extra functionality).

If I have 2 tracks from a 12-track album, it does no good to say tracks 1 and 2 if they're really album tracks 8 and 12. I was hoping there were a way to hack the existing GUI and change the variable. The track number is accessible via the public API (as are a couple other neat fields) as members of the MPMediaItem class:

NSString *const MPMediaItemPropertyAlbumTrackNumber;
NSString *const MPMediaItemPropertyAlbumTrackCount;
NSString *const MPMediaItemPropertyDiscNumber;
NSString *const MPMediaItemPropertyDiscCount;

So accessing them isn't an issue. And replacing text string constants is simple, but I am unfamiliar with if it is even possible to replace the existing variable without a programmatic change.

Anyone tried something like this? I often wonder why they decided that metadata wasn't important enough to include.