Thanks for your reply. No, the shuffle is off.
I should explain maybe what I want and what I have tried. My favourite view setting is Details with grouping turned on. I want the single-artist albums to be listed alphabetically by artist, grouped by album name, and I want the assorted (multi-artist) albums to be listed simply alphabetically by album name.
1. This is the closest I have got it to how I want. I choose Group > Album. This then does almost all of the above. Compilation albums come first; then single-artist ones. Single-artist albums are grouped into albums and listed alphabetically. Great. But the assorted albums are sorted not by album name but rather by date. Why!? No matter what I do to the sorting option, nothing changes.
2. So then I choose Group > More > Album. (Took me a while to work out what this does. It has the same name, 'album', as the previous grouping option, which is confusing as it obviously does not do the same thing). What this does is group all the albums alphabetically. If I try to then sort them by artist or artist (auto) nothing happens.
3. So then I tried Group > More > Album Artist (auto). Again, this has the desired effect for single-artist albums, which again come after the compilations. But the compilations are now all grouped as a single album with a single icon, with artist name "(Multiple Artists)".
Arg!
As I said, if I select Thumbnails view I get what I want. But the annoying thing about that is that if I click on an album to play it, it just loops when it gets to the end of the album, rather than moving onto the next album, as it does in Details view.
Any tips, folks?
Mark