ITunes 7.7 messes up alphabetical order

Question

Hello!
After installing iTunes 7.7 any new import I make is put to the wrong place in the alphabetical order. I use "Album by Artist" sorting, and when I imported an Avril Lavigne album it was put to the letter L instead of A. Similarly Alice Cooper went to C instead of A.
Trying to fix the issue I found the following:
- If I simply sort by Artist, the problem persists
- Even if I set the Artist to something completely different, like AC/DC, the album remains at the very same place. In fact, no matter what I do with the tags after importing, the songs won't budge an inch in the list.
Has anyone else encountered something similar? Any ideas as to how to fix the sorting?

Answer 1

Actually it wasn't enough to edit just one song's sorting info. I had to manually go through every song in the album and delete the sorting info to move the album. Is there a way to mass edit this?
Not that I've found... as you said, the sorting options do not appear when you are editing track info for multiple items. I experimented with this in my own library and when I changed the sort info on one track it moved the entire album. I looked through preferences and didn't see an option related to it, nor when you right-click on a song. When you right click on a song there is an option to "Apply Sort Field" and then it gives you a second menu of different fields available. Not sure if this makes a difference or not, as I didn't have to click on this option in order to get my music to move around. My iTunes library is sorted by "Album by Artist" ... if yours is different, try switching to that and see if it moves automatically for you.
Also, this never happened before 7.7. Is this a new function of iTunes 7.7 that it auto fills the sorting field with Last name, First name? Or could it be the Picard tagger I use to correctly tag the songs? (I am not entirely satisfied how iTunes tags the CDs I have so usually I grab the CDs to lossless AAC, run the tracks through Picard tagger and then add to the iTunes library.)
I didn't do anything special with the tracks in iTunes. The only Sort Artist I see in my iTunes is for a band name that starts with "The" to make sure they are not all grouped in the T section. If it is just a first and last name, I have no sort information entered. Any CDs I have were imported into iTunes (on a different computer, later copied to the MacBook via hard drive). I've never changed track info on songs purchased from the iTunes store.
Here's hoping this gets you somewhere...
Let me know what you find, I'd be curious to find more information on how "sorting" really works in iTunes.
CG