I have to laugh, I have no idea about an alternate view. It's so frustrating.
I would like all my music as albums, by date. (how I have it now)
For multi disc albums, Cd 1 and CD 2 is fine. 3, 4 whatever.
For boxed sets (A boxed set is an album, to me) the same view is fine BUT I need individual album art for each album and differing name and artist.
any such thing? To me it seems only natural
All CD's are like this and JRiver should be able to mimic it. No?
so I guess I am saying I want the same view I have with the physical CD's, they all come in one box, they are all together with differing artwork A CD (album), multi disc CD and box set CD should all be the same on the top layer.
What you want to do is essentially what I am doing now in a library of nearly 4,000 classical albums, with one exception. I simply tag the entire boxed set as one "album", and use the disc # tag field to indicate the disc within that. I could use the boxed set thumbnail for all discs in the album, or I could use a separate thumbnail for each disc, but not both. That distinction is not important to me. Incorporating both would require additional custom fields, which I prefer not to do. And, I do not care much about whether a composition I wish to play is from a single- or a Multi-disc album.
This works in conjunction with one single custom field in my library - Composition - identifying each separate work, often identical across the multiple tracks = movements in that Composition, the movement titles being identified in the Name field.
Occasionally, I have manipulated the Disc # field to get better delineation. For example, I have an album of all 15 Shostakovich symphonies, but they are not consecutive and some are together on the same optical disc, others span multiple discs. I just changed the Disc # field to be 1 to 15 corresponding to the symphony # and disregard the actual order on the optical discs. The Composition field also reflects this - Symphony No. 1 in key?, for example. I can figure out the correspondence to the optical disc media files from the file path tag if I ever need to, which I seldom do. But, normally, I leave the disc # tag alone.
Artists, etc. can be different from track to track.
I have little trouble browsing by composer, genre and composition, which is the way I normally navigate selections for playback. Navigation by artist, composer, composition is also no problem. Or, for jazz and pop music, by artist/album. I don't need much more than that to find what I wish to play on the spur of the moment.