Does the iPod follow the iTunes "sort filters" in Cover Flow?

Question

Two quick questions:
1) Is it now generally agreed upon how Cover Flow is sorted on the iPod? (i.e. Is it by +album title+, by artist, or by +album artist+?) Can you change how it's sorted?
2) If you have used the "sorting" tab feature in iTunes when editing song info, (for example, I have "album artist=Foo Fighters" in song info, but I also have album artist Foo Fighters sorting as "A1 Foo Fighters" for various listing reasons to keep it ahead of other album artists), will the iPod know to follow these sorting decisions?
The main reason I ask, is that I am digitizing my collection of 400+ cds, 100 of which are classical, 100 are musicals, 100 are rock, and 100 are other genres. I've had a lot of fun in iTunes with the Sorting tab in the song info box, which has allowed me to really sort my albums the way I want. For a classical album, like Bach's St. Matthew Passion, I leave the actual album title "as is," but then I have the Sorting album box sort this as "Classical, Bach's St. Matthew Passion," so that when I sort by album, all my classical cds show up together, in alphabetical order by album title, then my rock cds, etc. I do the same thing for album artist...I'll insert my own prefix, like "A1" or "Classical" or "Musicals" before the album artist name to make sure the genres stay together, even when I sort by album artist.
I'd like to use the iPod's Cover Flow, so I NEED to know the way the iPod Cover Flow will sort...If it sorts by Album Artist, I'll be much more careful with how I apply Album Artist "sorting" filters to my song info in iTunes. And I need to make REALLY sure that the iPod will actually abide by the iTunes Sorting tab, because otherwise all this tagging work I'm doing is for nothing.

Answer 1

As far as I can tall the tracks are initially sorted by the *Sort Artist* field. If this field doesn't exist it takes the value of the Artist field, with the provio that a leading "The " is ignored. Once grouped by artist the albums are sorted by the *Sort Album* field. Again, if this field doesn't exist it takes the value of the Album field with a leading "The " ignored. In iTunes artist names begining with numerals are listed first but on the iPod they are listed after those starting with A-Z and before the compilations.
When displaying the covers the iPod displays a new cover every time the album name and/or album artist changes. If you have one album by a given artist it should show once, even if there are guest artists listed in the artist field. If you have two albums however you may end up with four covers shown. This can be fixed by setting the *Sort Artist* to the main artist for each track with guests.
When the album is selected every track with the same album name is listed, most obvious if you flip over *Greatest Hits* and find 100+ tracks listed. To fix this you need to give every album a unique name. e.g. append ", Artist" to affected album titles. You can do this invisibly by making this change to the *Sort Album* field but it's worth noting this bug exists in iTunes too and it's probably better done visibly when using other views. The *Sort Album* field comes into it's own however when you want a group of albums displayed in a specific, non-alphabetical order. I have the Hitchhikers Guide radio series which I have reoganised to appear as single albums and set the fields as *Hitchhikers Guide 1*, *Hitchikers Guide 2* etc. to list them in the right order while still displaying the full album title.
Lastly the albums are displayed with the Artist field of the first track rather than the album artist. Looks odd on compilations and where the first track has a guest artist. No fix or workaround that I know of...
It took a while, but every one of my albums is listed in Cover Flow exactly once.
tt2