No Artist, No Album in iTunes, but they are always present on iPod?

Hello,
Can't seem to find the answer in the archives - would be grateful for any help.
I organise all content by Genre and optionally by Composer, that is all.
The Artist and Album content of the Info box is completely blank. I do not even have the Artist and Album columns displayed in iTunes.
However after sync'ing the iPod, the Artist and Album fields are always on the iPod even though the content is blank.
This means, every time I select a new Genre I have to do a double click-thru to get to actual content of the Genre (Artists -> All -> Click -> Albums -> All -> Click -> finally... I am there.
I wonder why iTunes insists on inserting the Artist and Album fields on the iPod, even though the content is completely blank? ..and the columns are not even displayed in iTunes?
The double click-thru every time I need to change a Genre is irritating and impedes use of the iPod.
If anyone has any clues I would be very grateful.
Thanks
Philip
--

Chris,
Thank you very much for your reply. Sorry to be so late following up - there is a reason. In the meantime I have been trying to research the documents in more detail..
The iPod cannot display the info unless it is in the ID3 tags.
It doesn't matter if the columns are displayed or not in iTunes.
The problem may be the other way around. My problem is that the iPod always displays Artists and Albums, even though the ID3 tags are completely empty and these classifications are irrelevant to the content of my iPod. This causes me to have click through these irrelevant fields every time I select a new Genre.. time wasting and very frustrating..
If you have no info in these boxes, iTunes will put them in Unknown Artist, Unknown Album.
That's exactly what's happening but I'd dearly like to have categorised folders. I'm beginning to realise that iTunes may use the Artist and Album tags as a means of creating subfolders. In one of the documents it says:
"As a music manager, iTunes creates a folder for each artist in the iTunes Music folder and subfolders of each artist's albums that contain the individual song files"
But surely they can't force the use Artist and Album tags where these classifications are completely irrelevant? Just one example of many: I have a self-made 90-minute recording called "Nightingales in the Luberon". Now exactly what Artist and what Album does that belong under? The only reasonable classification I can see is under my "Nature" Genre.
Same with my Classical Genre - none of those recordings have any "Artist" or "Album". They all have a Composer ID3 tag, but apparently that doesn't help me at all in organising them according to folders?
Why not simply go to Music -> Songs?
Well, I think that's pretty much what I've been to do, except I need more organisation, so instead of just Music -> Songs I have been trying to do Music -> Genres. The problem is the iPod insists on plugging in the Artist and Album fields, after the Genres.
Or create a playlist which contains only one genre, then Music -> Playlist?
You can go into iPod Settings -> *Main menu* and put these on the iPod main menu so you don't even have to go to Music then another selection.
Thank you for the ideas. But at the moment I already have Genres at the very top level menu. But after going into a specific Genre, selecting it, I still have to click through the (irrelevant) Artist and Album tags.
I think what I am really asking for is the ability to specify which metadata tags are used to organise content, and sub-folders on disk. So far I have not been able to find anything in the documents.
The top-level tag should be Genre, with in some cases, a sub-level tag of either Composer, Author, or Publisher, depending on the type of Genre. I would like iTunes to create named hierarchical folders for each of these tags.
I have so many disparate types of recording that I think the only sensible type of classification is by Genre, for example: Classical, Country&Western, Factual, French (audio tuition), Nature (my own recordings), Old Times, Relaxation (audio), Self-Improvement (audio).
I think that Apple does not help by making much of the documentation obscure and non-intuitive.. I was searching for documents about 'Organising the iTunes Library' - a big topic surely. But I could find nothing. In the end I found part of the answers I was looking for in a bizarrely named document called "Bring in the Noise". Now what on earth does that mean??
Thanks a lot for your help..
Philip
--

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No Artist, No Album in iTunes, but they are always present on iPod?

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