I am a bit baffled by the "various artists" problem. So help me understand the issue better...
I ripped all my music using another app than PMM (in ogg format), and it tags each song with the ARTIST field in the vorbis comment with the artist of the track, not that of the album (i.e., the actual artist, not "Various Artists"). The ALBUM name field is populated with the name of the album. Each album has its own folder, named by the album artist and the album title (i.e., "Various Artists - Gatecrasher National Anthems Disc 1"), and each track is named with the track number and track title (i.e., "22 - Iguana (Mas Mix).ogg"). I use PMM to update the database and sync/save to the DMS. When viewed under PMM, everything appears to be sorted correctly. So, it would appear that PMM does the "right thing" in that songs in the same album are sorted together even for the various artists albums.
As reported here, when browsing in "Albums" mode in the car, the songs get scattered all over the place. I know about the bad_album_db variable in phatbox.ini and had tried setting it to "off" or removing it but it didn't fix the problem.
So the question is, does the phatbox actually use each album's folder name to sort (which contains the string "Various Artists"), or does it use the ALBUM field in the tag info? If its the former, then it would explain the problem. I searched for a definitive answer (both here and google in general) but came up empty.
I guess I should also ask the question more generally: is it PMM or is it the phatbox that screws up the album sorting? If it's PMM, then it's being inconsistent, because it actually sorts it correctly on screen and plays everything in the proper order on the PC.
Thanks in advance for any info that would help me really understand the nature of the problem.
Also, can someone explain what the phatbox.ini variable "ssa_use_disc_up_down" do? I searched for this and also couldn't find an answer.
P.S. I am running the Phatnoise Media Manager 3.75, the phatbox is an Audi unit, updated to the latest firmware, the car is an 2001 Audi S4, but I doubt this matters.