At present, the album list is sorted by the name of the Album. For classical music collections, this makes no sense, because the album names are rather arbitrary: an album with Mozart's last three symphonies might appear as

  "Symphonies Nos. 39, 40 and 41"   or
  "The Symphonies, Volume 8"    or
  "The Last Symphonies" etc

so sorting by album name is a like a random shuffle. Sorting by album artist is much more likely to be useful for classical music (e.g. "Mozart"). Perhaps these remarks apply equally to other genres.

I changed one line of code in my own copy and recompiled banshee to suit my own preferences on this. I don't know what the right solution is here; and I do understand that there cannot be configuration options to suit everybody in all respects without cluttering the application.