The new handling of Album Artist is much better for me, but MC still misses out something absolutely vital - namely combined functionality with Rename From Properties. The other badly needed feature is the ability to treat the Artist field as a list, in the same way as the Keywords field. If MC had this fixed, it would give me the flexibility I need.
Consider if you will the album Stripped from Christina Aguilera, and in particular the track Dirrty featuring Redman.
I want to set the Artist field to "Christina Aguilera, Redman" and Album Artist field to "Christina Aguilera".
I want to do the first thing so that if I set up a view scheme "Artist/Name" I will see:
Christina Aguilera
...Dirrty
...
Redman
...Dirrty
I want the filenames based on Album Artist, not Artist, so that all tracks from Stripped end up in the same directory. Fine I can use [ALBUM ARTIST] but then unless I change the rename scheme each time, I will be forced to fill the Album Artist field for every track in every album. But isn't that what Album Artist (auto) is supposed to prevent you having to do?
As far as view schemes go, Album Artist (auto) will use the value of the Artist field for cases where all tracks in the album have the same Artist (ie no collaborative tracks), or the boilerplate "(multiple artists)" where this is not the case and the Album Artist field has been left blank. Why can I not use [ALBUM ARTIST AUTO] in the Rename From Properties schema?