You can make a smart playlist that shows only recently added. Once you do this, you can just click on the little bars at the top to sort them by artist, time, ratings and such.
sorry to hijack your answer MacBook-Gal but ive included a pic of how to make this smart playlist as i too found it hard to do once.
either right click on the "Recently Added" smart playlist and click "Edit Smart Playlist" or choose "File->New Smart Playlist" from the iTunes menu and match the picture below then type the Artist after "is".
duhhh i totally forgot about that.
the converting 9900 songs to aac thing was bugging me and i forgot.
o ya holy moly is this going to take forever. 1 hour 300 songs 9600 more to go