Cheers for the reply. By "stacked", I mean that I see a pile of several album covers corresponding to an artist.
I did add the sort, and it works. The labeling, however, does not: With "band" some labels appear, and some do not. With "albumartist", the labels all show up as [albumartist] (i.e. it is not recognised). These fields (exactly as I've typed them here) most definitely exist in my files, and the data in them is correct.
Perhaps I am not understanding something fundamental. The story of tags, as I've pieced it together, is this:
Each music file can hold information about the music it contains, and this information is structured in "fields". Some fields are pre-labeled; specifically which ones they are depends on the codec, but some are, by design, common between different codecs (e.g. "title"); the rest of the fields can be labeled by the user. Some codecs have code-names for fields, e.g. in MP3 "TPE2" corresponds to "band". On top of that, music programs sometimes display these labels in their own way. So, there is a large margin for error when the user is sorting, viewing, and labeling/"tagging" their music. Is that right? I'm quick to learn but have no technical background.
About my labeling problem:
-Is "Album Artist" as it appears in Media Center the same as "albumartist" as it might appear in other programs? Or, is "Album Artist" different from "albumartist"? Perhaps Media Center is getting confused somehow. But then, "band" should work OK, and it does not.
-Does Media Center's display behaviour vary by codec, even though the specific field names are consistent across the different codecs?
-Can user-defined fields trip up a program? In my music files, "albumartist" is a user-defined field in MP3s but is native to FLAC; "band" is native to MP3 but is 'user-defined' in FLAC.
With respect to tagging, I would rather have one, primary column that contains the information I want. Therefore, I don't mind redundantly tagging for albumartist/band in all of my files. I can do it as a batch job and it takes two seconds.
No offense to anyone, but the whole system of tagging is horribly short-sighted, and it underscores how it important it is to get a categorisation system correct from the start. That said, I am glad I found Media Centre, which seems to be absolutely tops in terms of sorting through the mess. I might even be able to tag the remaining 70% of my music collection that is classical music, one day. Previous to finding Media Center, I had given up hope!
Many thanks again!
Cheers,
VBrook