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Compilation albums - how to group the tracks into one album?

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Mr Swordfish:
Just imported my library from iTunes, and most of the compilation albums came over fine. But about a dozen of them were imported as a series of one-track albums.  How do I aggregate the various tracks into a single album?

In iTunes, combining or splitting albums was straightforward - select all the tracks you want, right click on "song info" and enter the album name. Not sure how it stored it internally or how it handled different albums that happen to have the same title, but I'm sure thate's more to it than just a text match on the album name. 

I don't understand Media Center's data model, but I'm sure that it handles this situation when the data is entered correctly, I haven't seen a way  to aggregate tracks in Music Center.  Probably simple, but I'm not seeing it. I assume you don't expose an interface to the SQL...

JimH:
Edit the Album Artist.  That tells MC to consider it an album.

blgentry:
You might enjoy reading this explanation to tell you about the MC approach to this.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_(Auto)

Brian.

Mr Swordfish:
Less than 5% of the tracks in my library have the "Album Artist" populated, the rest do not, including all the tracks that are part of compilation albums, some of which are treated as albums and some of which are a bunch of one-track albums.

So, I'm not sure how that would work... and if it does, what do I put there? Something that indicates it's a multiple-artist album? And is there a way to select and eit multiple tracks at a time or do I have to go in and fix up every single track?

I notice that albums that were imported "correctly" say "[Album name] by (Multiple Artists)" while the problematic ones specify the name of the artist in the line above the track list.  So there must be something else that tells Music Center that these tracks should be considered an album.  Not sure how to fix up the data...

Mr Swordfish:

--- Quote from: blgentry on June 27, 2023, 02:00:05 pm ---You might enjoy reading this explanation to tell you about the MC approach to this.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_(Auto)


--- End quote ---

Thanks. Useful information.  Unfortunately, it doesn't explain the behavior I'm seeing.

For the "bad" compilations, all the tracks are in the same folder, all the values for "Album" are identical, the "Album Artist" field is empty, but the Album Artist (auto) field is populated by the artist, not the default (Multiple Artists).

Something else must be telling Music Center that these individual tracks are Single-artist albums.  I can't detect and difference in the data between the compilations that were imported correctly and the ones that were not. 

Any idea how Music center determines whether it's a single artist album vs a multiple artist album?

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