I am still confused as to why changing the way MC sorts artists would have any impact on how tracks are sorted for a given album/CD for that artist. These should be completely independent.
I see I helped you with a related issue before. It doesn't seem you internalized the information given you then.
The way MC sorts Artists
is completely independent from the way it sorts tracks. You're confused because you do not understand the way MC displays and sorts information, nor do you understand what you actually did in creating and using your "Artist Sort".
I'll try to explain... Look at the screenshot in your post timed 11:22:01.
On the left, Items to Show: each one is a "View", a screen, a choice you can select of items to display; the actual word listed (like "Artist" or "Album" or "Highly Rated") is meaningless to MC, it's just a label for your use, like Blue or Pretty, and what is displayed when you select it could be
anything.
On the right, Show Categories in This Order: This is a real list, of real MC database fields or expressions or other such constructs. The items on this list constitute a set of hierarchical levels that you drill into when you select the View listed on the left. So in your screenshot, when you select the view that just happens to be labeled "Artist", you will FIRST be presented with a selection of artists, pulled from the [Album Artist (auto)] field. When you select one of those (by pressing enter, or double-clicking, or tapping, etc) you will DRILL DOWN to the next level.
At the next level, you will be presented a list of ALBUMS, each with the [Album Artist (auto)] you just selected.
You could have an arbitrary number of levels, allowing you to drill down and down and down. But you only have 2 levels here. We'll come to what happens when you drill through the last level in a moment.
First a word about sorting. These categories/levels are displayed one after another according to the order shown in that dialog box. They are each sorted according to the method described in your first screenshot of the post from 06:03:46.
Each category/level can have its own sorting method, show at the bottom of this screen. You can thus have [Album Artist (auto)] (the list of artists) sorted Alphabetically, and [Album] (the list of albums) sorted chronologically. This has NOTHING to do with how tracks are sorted.
Now back to drilling down through levels...
When you drill down into the last level ([Album] in your example) by selecting something at that level, then you will be presented with a list of FILES. Tracks, if you're looking at music. You cannot drill down any further than the file/track level. When you finally get to the file level, the results can be modified according to the rules set by clicking the "Set Rules for File Display" button. Look at the second screenshot of your post timed 06:03:46.
In the top section of that Edit Search dialog, you are applying filtering rules for what files are and are not displayed. Generally, they will be selected from a list that matches the criteria you've already selected by drilling down through the categories. But you can further modify it here, perhaps by excluding any files with a rating of 1 star. You chose to include only files that do not have an empty [Album Artist] field.
In the bottom section, you can set the
sort order for the files. Here their own sort order is defined, totally independent of the sort orders you saw for the categories above. The sorting order does not affect what files are listed (that is done above) it only affects the order in which they are listed.
You could sort by track number. You could sort by [Name] of the track. You could sort by [Duration]. You chose to sort by Artist Sort.
If the bottom section is configured as "No Modification" then MC presents things in the order it thinks most appropriate, which is content-sensitive decision. For Music, it would sort files in this order:
Album Artist (auto)
Album
Disc #
Track #
As you can see, you can sort by multiple criteria. In this method, tracks 1-10 of disc 1 would all appear before tracks 1-10 of disc 2. (So you would see a song with a track # of 5 earlier in your list than a song with a track # of 1, because it had a lower Disc #).
Remember, MC is computer software. And computers are literal things; they don't do what you intend, they do what you say. You can tell them to do something clever, or you can tell them to do something stupid, and they'll do exactly what you tell them to do. You perhaps thought you were telling MC to sort your list of artists and albums by "Artist Sort" but you actually told MC to sort your
tracks by "Artist Sort" and it did, and you didn't like the results. So with the change I gave you, you told it to use a different sorting method for tracks (the default). That you liked. It's a simple as that.
MC is essentially a database. Media is displayed for you as a result of a search of that database, and that search can be very simple or very complicated, and its results can be modified and formatted in a myriad of ways. When you stray from the defaults, it's incumbent on you to know what you're doing.
Admittedly, the JRiver interface is not overly clear about all this. Dialog boxes could be better structured and better labeled. It has a steep learning curve, and it's hard for most people to understand this stuff just from looking at the interface; it is not at all self-explanatory. But you can make it do almost anything.
I suggest you read the following threads, to better understand how the software works for future use:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68960.0 (Study this carefully; the concepts are very applicable)
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=103854.0 (Customizing Theater View uses the same interface as for JRemote)
I hope this has made more clear what's going on.
