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[Ignoramus]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but...I have quite a few albums, by 'various artists'...with the same album name, and in some cases same genre. Of course, the folder names are different, but the information regarding Album artists; album name & genre (which are the same in some albums), get loaded as one album. Is there a setting that will keep albums with same tags, but in different folders, can be kept apart? At the moment, I add a numerical character to the album name in the tags, to keep the albums separate, but I'm not really happy with this 'work-around'.

[LilyAarseth]

I have the same issue, for example, Diana Ross released two different "Ross" and Diana Ross" albums with several years in between, but the albums gets mixed together with an average year between the tracks calculated instead. All of the albums have different folder paths. In album view I noticed sometimes that albums with the same title but different artists are also grouped together, but this might perhaps not be a bug, though I wish it was possible to seperate with an option.

[wer]

It is the [Album] and [Album Artist] tags that determine what album a track belongs to.

If two files are grouped in the same album by MC, use those two fields to differentiate them.

MC does not use disk location to differentiate. Only the tags matter. (There's a special case for compilation albums. See here.)

If the same artist has the poor sense to release two albums with exactly the same names, if you tag them that way, MC will consider them the same album.

So give MC the same help you would give a human, and use the year to differentiate: you would say to a human "Diana Ross the 1970 release". So what most people do is make the Album tag = Diana Ross (1970)   Just like you see in that list.

It's as simple as that.

[LilyAarseth]

The issue with this is that then it messes up my last.fm statistics because it submits exactly what the tag data is, so it'll include the manual seperator in the tag data. Wouldn't be too hard to make MC separate two albums if the [Date] or [Year] file tags contain different years?

[zybex]

Why not just customize your View and categorize by (group by) "Artist - Album (Year)" ?
If that's not enough you can group instead by an Expression containing whatever fields you need to differentiate the albums.

For your example of the Ross/Diana Ross albums, they actually have different titles, so should not show up bundled together. Perhaps your View is just grouping by Artist+Year, instead of Artist+Album+Year.

[wer]

The issue with this is that then it messes up my last.fm statistics because it submits exactly what the tag data is, so it'll include the manual seperator in the tag data. Wouldn't be too hard to make MC separate two albums if the [Date] or [Year] file tags contain different years?

Then maybe you should label the albums the same as last.fm does: "Diana Ross" and "Diana Ross (Expanded Edition)"  and  "Diana Ross" and "Diana Ross (Reissue Version)".

I'll point out that the way you use the date field on a track may not be the way others use it, so that changing the definition of album to include date could mess up what other people are doing.  For example, tracks are often released as singles before the album; this happened as a matter of course years ago. If people are using that date, many tracks on an album could have different dates, and thus different years for an album that was released early in the year. There's no one way to satisfy everyone.

Personally I'd be fine with using the year. But I'm a user just like you, so I'm not going to debate how you'd like MC to behave or how hard it is to change it. I'm just telling you how it does behave.  If you want your albums separated properly, you'll need to fix your tags.

For your example of the Ross/Diana Ross albums, they actually have different titles...

Actually, no.  If you look closely Zybex, there were TWO different sets of albums with duplicated names. Two albums named "Diana Ross" and two named "Ross".  Four albums total.

If you absolutely refuse to fix your tags, then you can customize your view to split albums based on year.
Remove [Album] as a category, and add an Expression instead:
Expression:  [Album]-[Year]
Expression to display: [Album]

Then (for standard view) you will need to set the thumbnail text at that level to display [Album].
Learn more about customizing views by reading Marko's excellent tutorial.

This just changes how the information is presented. MC will still consider the tracks part of one album, which affects things like volume leveling and other functions.

So I suggest you just fix your tags.

[LilyAarseth]

Appreciate the input and suggestions, will experiment a bit around to see if I can get it to work.

[zybex]

Actually, no.  If you look closely Zybex, there were TWO different sets of albums with duplicated names. Two albums named "Diana Ross" and two named "Ross".  Four albums total.

Hmm, you're right. Spotify also calls them "Expanded Edition". Anyway, grouping by Album+Year or Album+Artist+Year would work.

[wer]

You're welcome.

[Ignoramus]

Most of my CDs are compilations, so the album artist is 'Various Artists'...I use genre, as the folder name. So, all the 60's CD's are grouped in a parent '60's' folder....and I use the album artist CD title, as the folder for any CD....and it's here the problem lies. Two compilations CD with the titles 'No. 1's Of The 60's' (for example), would both be in the 60's folder, and they would have their own subfolder 'Various Artists - No. 1s Of The 60's', and the other would be 'No. 1s Of The 60's (2). I don't keep dates in the tags, and the genre of both would be 60's (same as parent folder's name). Obviously the CD title would be the same, as would album artist.
So, you see why they are 'lumped together in a single folder? If the player just kept folder separate...that Would do it.