@jonhd Thanks for the suggestion.

No, I haven't tried that, but I guess it is an option.
Just seems odd I can not "set" the default sort field to track or quite honestly any of the allowed parameters.
As I mentioned it is not a huge deal as it is simply a click or two to list by track.
I guess I could always make a playlist of each album as well, with the songs in the proper order,

@amour8440083555 How does you post thematically fit in the current thread?

@Juanma
I don't have a subscription so I can't test. But maybe Spotify changed something causing it to break.

Can anyone else confirm if Spotify still works or not?

@jonhd Thank you!

@Ausron46
Might be some space or different characters in the name.
Try Tools / Console and enter:

SELECT distinct albumartist, artist, album from songs where artist like '%ventures%';

See if all the albums under The Ventures shows up, and check if there is a difference in naming, ie.: if there is a space before | album.

Following up on this — the moodbar workaround is a fair suggestion, but I think it is worth distinguishing because moodbar and a real waveform actually solve different problems/features. The moodbar shows the spectral "mood" of a track as a colour gradient, which is fine for a vibe, but the colour bands do not reliably correspond to where the loud parts, drops, breaks, or quiet sections are. As a DJ I find myself wanting to see the actual amplitude shape of the track — the peaks and troughs over time — so I can spot a drop, a build-up or a breakdown by eye in a few hundred milliseconds. Mixxx and most DJ-oriented tools display this as a horizontal waveform strip with a playhead, and it is hard to go back to scrubbing without one.

What I would propose for Strawberry is a proper waveform visualization that lives in the analyzer area above the progress bar, alongside Block, Boom, Turbine and the others, as just another option in the right-click "Analyzer" menu. Selecting it would render the loudness contour of the entire current track as a horizontal waveform, with a playhead moving across it as the song plays. It would not replace the moodbar (moodbar can stay exactly where it is, painted into the slider groove), and it would not replace the live spectrum analyzers either.

It would just be one more option in that menu, for the users who want it.

I had a look at the code and the feature seems quite feasible without adding any new dependency. The moodbar pipeline already handles the hardest part: running a GStreamer pre-pass over a track on a worker thread and caching the result. A waveform pipeline would essentially be the same pattern, but storing peak/RMS values instead of FFT-derived colours. Other parts of the engine (Chromaprint, EBU R128 loudness analysis) already extract raw PCM from GStreamer in the exact way a waveform would need.

I am planning to open a GitHub issue to gauge the maintainers' interest. Would anyone else here find this useful? Especially curious whether other DJs, or people working with mixes and live recordings, would back this up.

The issue still occurs on Version 1.2.18.

I find that the best way to handle this is to use the "Album Artist" tag.

For albums that don't have the exact same artist name for every song, (but are not "Various Artists" compilation albums) put the name of the primary artist there.

Then, in the "Group By" setting, select one of the options that sorts by "Album Artist". It seems that with this configuration, albums that don't have an "Album Artist" entry will still be sorted by "Artist".

While one could use the "Album Artist" tag for all albums, I only use it for exceptions, like the example given in the original post.

Side Note (regarding compilations, aka "Various Artists":

For compilations, while some prefer to use "Various Artists" as the "Album Artist" entry, I prefer to check the "Compilation" checkbox instead, and leave "Album Artist" blank. Strawberry honors that tag, and will create a "Various Artists" heading in the library.

This is a hold-over from my years of experience with iTunes, which uses that "Compilation" tag. This may not be a universal solution, but in Strawberry, at least, it works for me.