setting ignore.sort in the All Artists tag?

[simoncn]

You are correct that if all albums are tagged with AlbumArtist and all music is part of an album, the AlbumArtist and Artist indexes will be the same. In this case, there is no need to show the AlbumArtist index. You might have noticed that the AlbumArtist index is not shown by default, just the Artist and All Artists indexes.

You are also correct that "n albums" and "n items" show the same contents. The need to have both of these arises when you are browsing a richly tagged library and your selection (for example, tracks backed by Oscar Peterson) contains tracks from albums rather than complete albums. In this case, you might want to see a list of the tracks or you might want to see a list of the albums containing the tracks.