OK, I played around a bit more and discovered that
beet ls -f’$albumartist_sort’ etheridge
returns a bunch of lines like this
‘’
I take that to mean that field is blank
When I look in picard, I get this:
Which is what I typically saw as I was importing everything via Picard. It appears that even though the album artist sort order is populated in picard, it doesn’t actually save it to the tags, or is it just a calculated field in picard?