Well I disagree. If you just had a flag for "Compilation", you would still need a way to group the tracks that belonged to the compilation together, and that would be, effectively, the Album name plus Album Artist, because Album names often are not unique. How many albums called "Love" or some variation of it have you seen? I've seen lots of duplicate album names, that cam only be differentiated using a combination of the Album and Artist names, or for compilations, Album Artist.
If [Album Artist (auto)] was working properly in your system, it would have been intuitive. Something is broken.
The only reason I can think of that [Album Artist (auto)] wouldn't work is that something was already in that tag, maybe even if it was a blank space or a non-displayable character or something. As you appear to just be starting with MC, and no doubt most of your tagging has been done outside MC, it could be that your previous software put something in that tag, or MC tried to place existing tags as best it could in the library when it imported your music, and put it in that tag.
The "fix" would be to clear any values in the [Album Artist (auto)] tag;
1. Backup your MC library, using the built in function, but running it manually. (
Note: You should test the following on a small number of files first, to check how it works and make sure it does what you want.)
2. Select all your music files, sort them by [Album Artist (auto)] and check if there is anything important in there. The sort them by [Album Artist] tag to check if anything in there is important.
3. Anything in the [Album Artist (auto)] tag should also already be in the [Album Artist] tag.
If you delete what is in the [Album Artist (auto)] tag I believe that the contents of the [Album Artist] tag will also be deleted. So if you want or need to keep what is in either of those tags, you need to save them first. One way to save them is;
3a. Create a new temporary field in MC using "Tools>Options>Library & Folders>Manage Library Fields..." I'll call it [SavedTag]. (f you want to save values from both the [Album Artist (auto)] and [Album Artist] tags, you will need two new fields.)
3b. In the View you were using, right click on the header and add the [SavedTag] to the view so that it is visible.
3c. Select all your files again, right click on the [SavedTag] field and rename. Enter "=[Album Artist (auto)]" into the field,without the quotes. That will copy the contents [Album Artist (auto)] into [SavedTag].
4. Back in the view you were using, with all files selected, Right click on the [Album Artist (auto)] tag, select Rename, and delete the contents of that tag for all files.
5. Copy any data saved in the [SavedTag] tag back to [Album Artist] tag, only for the files you want to copy back, by selecting those files and putting "=[SavedTag]" into the [Album Artist] tag. The [Album Artist (auto)] tag will then be automatically updated.
6. Cleanup: Delete the [SavedTag] from your Vew, and then delete it from the Library.
That should get you back to a functioning [Album Artist (auto)] tag. However if you have already fixed all your compilation albums, maybe you don't need to do that.
Yes, MC will set the [Album Artist (auto)] tag to (Multiple Artists) automatically,
if all the criteria are met. They are specified in the Wiki;
In order for (Multiple Artists) to appear automatically, the album must be in its own exclusive directory (i.e., if there are files from more than one album in a directory, the program will not label it as Multiple Artist).
Here is the logic. A track is a mix if all the files with the same [Album] value in the same directory:
Have more than one [Artist] value among them
Have no other [Album] values used by any other file in the same directory
Are Audio and have a non-empty [Album] value