MC uses the [Album] tag along with the [Artist] and [Album Artist] to determine what it shows as "one album". If your tags, in all of those fields, are the same for different versions of an album, then you're definitely going to see the behavior you're describing.
There are several approaches to fixing this. None of them involve any kind of MC option. I.E., there's no setting that fixes this; it's intentional behavior. Things I've done:
A. At one time, I made a new Library field called Album Info. In that field I put things like "DVD-A 24/96 2001". Those items are the disc type it came from, the resolution, and the year that the alternate version was released. Then I made a new Albums view that used Album Info as a determining factor for how to group albums together. This took a couple of tries, but once I got it, it worked well.
The problem with this approach is that remotes like JRemote don't know about this field. So you have to alter the views there too. That's actually not a problem at all. What *is* a problem though, is that JRemote (and other remotes) still don't know about this field when doing *searches*. So searches mix all of your album versions together, which I found annoying. So I eventually stopped doing this method entirely and switched to...
B. Just add on some identifying information to the end of the [Album] tag for alternate versions. For example, I have Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album both in a CD version and a high res version from DVD-A. The regular version has an album tag of "Rumours". The DVD-a version's Album field is "Rumours DVD-A". So they are grouped automatically as separate albums.
I still use the Album Info field, to hold extra information like the re-release date (2001 for Rumours DVD-A) and sometimes studio information, or other info like Mobile Fidelity's CD release code. My primary Albums view displays the Album Info field as a third line (under Artist and Album).
I'm guessing that you might have more than a handful of albums with alternate versions. If most of these are high resolution versions, then you can very easily isolate all of these by a simple search on the [Bit Depth] or [Sample Rate] field. Since CDs are 16/44.1k and high res will be 24/96, 24/48, etc. Once they are isolated, you might even cook up a good expression for modifying the Album field right in place. I can help you with that if you are interested.
Or, if you only have a small number of albums like this, you can manually just edit the Album field for the alternate version and be done with it.
Brian.
Author
Topic: How to turn off album combination (Read 3279 times)