itunes populating the Album Artist automatically

Not sure which forum to put this, sorry. I'm using Windows XP on a PC and have been using iTunes for about 6 months now.

I've got a wierd little thing going on with itunes (at home) at the moment and can't find any info on the net about it. I have a feeling it's something that's been introduced with a recent version of itunes.



What happens is this: when I play a song (in itunes) that has the Album Artist field empty, itunes automatically populates the field, I assume with the same information that's contained in the Artist field. The problem (more of a pain in the ****) is that when it does this, it moves the song order (within the album) around.

So, if I click on a song that's halfway through an album, itunes will instantly fill out the Album Artist field, and move the song to the first position in the album, irrespective of what track number it is.

However, the reason it's really given me the dirts is that itunes feels that every song I now play in itunes that falls victim to this phenomenon needs to be re-copied to the ipod. Not just updated, but actually re-copied across, which, through USB 1.1, takes some time when I've played 1,500 songs (including songs I've skipped after playing for a couple of seconds) since I last updated my ipod.



I've spent plenty of time looking at the extremely limited options in itunes but really don't see anything it could be - "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" under the advanced tab in preferences is not ticked. This has only been happening somewhat recently (last month or couple of months), and is still happening when I updated itunes to the latest version on the apple website last night.

I realise that one probable way of fixing it would be to go through and populate the Album Artist field myself, but would like to avoid doing so, because of the sheer number of songs in my library. Also, save the "itunes is a heap of ****, use X instead" comments, thanks.

Does this happen to anyone else? Does anyone know why it does this? Does anyone know if I can stop this from happening?