No, that will not play across groups. (in this case, grouped by album)
Yeah... I think this is by design. I can see how reasonable users would disagree on the "proper behavior" for this situation.
As it is in MC, View Groupings are treated, essentially as though they are separate "tiers" of categories (or separate Panes if your view is in Panes-mode). It displays them inline, but when you use files within a grouping, you can "imagine" that you've actually drilled down into that category and are viewing only that one "item" at the grouping level. They are not just "the way it is drawn on screen".
As I said... I think reasonable users could disagree here, but if I had to bet, most users would
probably expect the current behavior.
Personally, the whole Grouping system confuses me. It seems to outsmart me sometimes, and I often can't quite get the grouping behavior I want. The biggest issue is that it messes with your sort order, and you aren't able to directly choose what particular tags to use (in what order and combinations) should be used.
For example... I
do not use the [Artist Album (Auto)] system
at all. I never, ever,
ever want sets of files grouped by "Various Artists" in any view. I couldn't care less that a particular file by Artist X came from a movie soundtrack or mixer, and if I want to go and listen to a particular "compilation" album together (which is rare enough) then I'll browse through All Artists and choose the Album itself at the next tier in the hierarchy. But, if I try to group my Music view by Albums (which would be nice in theory) then it moves all those soundtrack and compilation albums to "Various" in the sort order, even though I have [Artist] and not [Album Artist (Auto)] in ALL of my views, columns, and sort order schemes. It, essentially, overrides your sort-order and uses the grouping Field as the topmost sort-order item.
I realize this is personal preference, but it can be frustrating. It would be perfect if we could specify grouping that comes "underneath" the current sort order. So, if I have a sort order that is:
[Artist], [Album], [Disc #], [Track #], [Name](which is what I commonly use for music)I'd like to apply [Album] grouping, but have it keep the sort order
identical to how it is without the grouping applied, only adding groups where multiple consecutive files in the existing sort-order would already be "contiguous" (based on the current sort-order). That way, I could group by album without having my albums that happen to have some non-alphanumeric character at the head float to the top of my sort order when I'm viewing the "All Artists pane" in my view.