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[Michael2663]

Hello,

I have several remasterings of some albums. Since they have similar track names and the same artists all the tracks appear under one album cover. How could I have a separate cover for each mastering so it would be easy to play one mastering vs another without having to select the tracks manually?

I'm surely missing something fundamental but I haven't found any topic that addresses this.

Thank you all.

[wer]

Hard way: learn how to customize your views so as to segregate tracks based on additional criteria like release date, then retag all those albums. There will still be drawbacks.

Easy way: Change the album name for different releases, e.g. "Physical Graffiti (2006 Remaster)" then give those the new cover art you want.

[Michael2663]

Thank you. I tried renaming to no effect.  I'll give it another go.

[Manfred]

You can use the MC field: "Version", e.g for Wagners "Ring der Nibelungen - Götterdämmerung" - you then have for the three versions of the Album: Solti - 1984CD's; Solti -1997 CD's; Solti - BD; You also have then the three Cover Art's for the different versions of the Album.

[Michael2663]

That sounds perfect. How do I change version?  It wasn't obvious and I saw no help entry for it.

[wer]

That sounds perfect.

It's not, unfortunately. (Remember how I mentioned drawbacks earlier?) MC will still consider the tracks part of the same Album internally, which means things like Volume Leveling and the expand function in the search language or smartlists will not work appropriately. Of course if you're ok with those issues, you should do whatever you prefer.

If you actually changed the name in the [Album] field, it's impossible for it to have no effect; the tracks would be split into separate albums. You still have to change the album art for the newly separated albums in a separate step.

[Michael2663]

I'm about to quit trying. The other album has a different name and always has.  Whenever I try to add it JRiver auto-imports the tracks into the first album.  I deleted all the new tracks from the album, then tried the "import a separate folder" action on the other album with the same results.

JRiver seems recognize to the other album tracks as belonging to the first album and so imports them into it. 

I don't know the intricacies of JRiver. Clearly it's doing something I cannot control.

[wer]

Quit if you want.  Or if you want help, post screenshots showing a view with the Album, Album Artist, and Artist tags for all the tracks, so we can see what's wrong.  There is a mistake in your tags somewhere.

What folder they're in doesn't matter. Only the contents of the tags matters.

[Michael2663]

I should have said that the files of the other album are in a folder of another name.  I've never directly assigned a name to an album so figured JRiver used the folder name.  I'll study tags.  I've never used them intentionally. Thanks.

[wer]

That's the problem then. MC is essentially a database that organizes your media according to metadata (tags).  This allows you to keep your music anywhere, spread across many drives or devices, and yet view and manage it cohesively.

So things like location and folder name don't matter at all. Tags are everything.

If you have never tagged anything before, you will have a lot to learn.  This article links to some specific tagging features in MC:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Tagging

But if you are new to tagging, you would be best served by googling tagging and starting to read some general articles on the concept.

Good luck...

[Michael2663]

Thank you. I appreciate your help. I'll get there now.