ITunes Sorting gone crazy - please advise!!!

Question

Hello All!
I've recently refreshed my PC and reinstalled iTunes (9.2.1.5) and I imported my library back into it so I could get back to business as usual, but this time iTunes decided to start acting a fool.
Typically, my library is sorted by Album Artist, that way if I have an album that has multiple artists, I can keep them intact under iTunes without having a thousand different entries for the same album. Then, under that everything sorts out just fine - there's no need to worry about the tracks being out of order or any other silliness.
However this time, I have had to fight to get the albums to display properly. Many of them come up as "unknown artist, unknown album" on the cover flow, even when the file info is fully intact. I usually have to tinker with each album 5 or six times to get this to go away, which has become especially time consuming.
But that's not what really irks me. After everything gets sorted properly for an album, the stupid tracks are out of order - for no reason at all! There is no pattern that iTunes is using to sort the track numbers, as I have checked each field to figure out what is going on... I know there is no way to sort by album artist, then by track number, but this program should be smart enough to figure out something as basic as that!
What gives???

Answer 1

You can allocate extra memory to a Java program by putting something like
java -Xmx256m Myclass
That should tell you if running out of memory is really your problem.
Memory from abandoned items isn't recovered until the JVM decides to do a "garbage collection" which it doesn't usually bother with until it finds memory a bit tight.
You shouldn't cast byte input to char. In Java a character is a 16 bit UNICODE code value, and it's relationship with bytes depends on the "character encoding", by default the one native to your operating system.
If you want to read character input from a file etc. then use a Reader not an InputStream. If necessary you can "wrap" an input stream in an InputStreamReader object.
If you want to read it from the user in a Swing program then use an input field of some sort.