Sorry Matt, I should have been more specific - I know you've got plenty of other stuff to handle, so I replied with brevity. To your credit, the closest I've gotten to a satisfactory scheme is the default (sorting removed). I've tried a scary number of sort variations using the column headers without success - that's what I meant by "doesn't work". So "doesn't work for me" could be replaced with "I can't achieve what I would like using that method".
If you want to try to replicate the behaviour I described:
View Scheme:
Genre / Album Artist (auto) / Album
Folder structure:
Genre \ Artist
'Genre \ Album Artist' for compilations
Filename conventions:
for one-artist albums: Artist - Album - Track # - Name
for songs that don't belong to an album: Artist - Title
for compilations: Album - Track # - Artist - Title
Songs that don't belong to an album are stored in the appropriate Artist folder.
Again, except for the filename-dependent listing of songs that don't belong to an album, the default view (sorting removed) is nearly perfect. But I'm type A+ so I try to use the columns to get all my singles grouped together, with artists grouped together, and album artists grouped together, and albums in order, with tracks in order. That's where I go horribly wrong...
Album-2, Artist-1hoses compilations
Album-2, Album Artist-1if there's no Album Artist defined it sorts by Album, splitting up Artists in the list
Album-3, Artist-2, Album Artist-1compilations (tracks with Album Artist tags) pushed to the bottom and hoses compilations' track order
Track-4, Album-3, Artist-2, Album Artist-1compilations (tracks with Album Artist tags) pushed to the bottom and hoses compilations' track order
The list goes on for a while...
Next-to-bottom line: I can't use Album Artist (auto) in the list sort, and the default sort uses the filenames, so I'm not going to achieve what I want without a comprehensive retagging and renaming effort.
Bottom line: in the larger scheme of things this is trivial, so I'm blowing it off and just listening to teh hooj choonz