Problems on my iPod Classic with tags

Question

There are 3 "problems" with the tags on my 80gb iPod classic.
My first one: When I have an album, where on some of the songs the tab has a capital and some don't (i.e. From the Mars Hotel and From The Mars Hotel) it displays them as different albums. This most definitely did NOT happen on the 5th generation iPods Second problem: I noticed that all my artists that have "The" as the first word, have been moved to the "T" section of my artists list (i.e. The Grateful Dead was once with G, now it is with T. Also, I have noticed that Albums starting with numbers have been moved to the bottom of the lists.
These are not really "problems", but they are kind of, discrepancies I guess, and I'm not sure if there is any way to adjust this. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Yes, current iPod firmware wants identical spelling of the album name if it's not to treat the tracks as coming from separate albums.
Your issue with "The Greatful Dead" is not what I & others have noticed. If I look at the *Sort Artist* field for my tracks by *The Grateful Dead* I find it auto-populated with *Grateful Dead* in a light grey. Same goes for artists/tracks/albums/album artists beginning with an article ("the", "a" or "an") - iTunes will assume that the articles should be ignored during searching and auto-sets the sort fields appropriately. Where I have deliberately set the value of one of these fields (e.g. to stop albums with guest artists appearing as more than one album) they are displayed in black rather than grey. I wonder if, perhaps, you have managed to set the Sort Artist tag so that the article is included.
In general, as you note, ordering is A-Z, numerals, compilations (where appropriate) with any value in the sort field having preference over the value shown in the menu.
tt2