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[markf2748]

Background
Suppose I have a single audio Album consisting of three uniquely named discs, whose folder structure is:

Artist > Album > Name of Disc1 (contains Disc 1 cover jpg & flacs)
Artist > Album > Name of Disc2 (contains Disc 2 cover jpg & flacs)
Artist > Album > Name of Disc3 (contains Disc 3 cover jpg & flacs)

To group albums into an "album collection" within MC (three discs listed under a single Album collection folder), each disc is given the same value of field [Album].  The disc album's original name is "preserved" by using it as the disc foldername, which also makes it visible in searches and usable in Thumbnail Text.  This works for me so far.

Each Disc has its own unique artwork stored inside its flacs as well as duplicated in respective jpg sidecars.  The displayed MC thumbnail for each disc shows respective cover art (see second attachment for a 7-disc collection).  This works.

I place a unique single cover art jpg file for the collection into the Album folder, next to its three subfolders.  Unfortunately, for this case, the displayed MC thumbnail for the album folder defaults to that of Disc1.  i.e. cover art in the Album folder is ignored (first attachment shows my collection cover which is never displayed).  Needs fixing.

Feature Request
For an "album collection" folder structure as shown, the thumbnail for the album collection folder ("Album") should default to artwork stored in the Album folder itself.  If no artwork is found there, then display artwork of the first disc (which apparently is the current default, and works well for multi-disk albums which all have the same artwork and are not considered "album collections").

Note:  The existing mechanism of putting artwork in the folder C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 32\Cover Art with the album name does not work, since then the album collection folder and all three albums exhibit that same cover art thumbnail.

The bigger problem:  The above scheme works surprisingly well for me, being a relatively simple kluge. It is challenged within some views when the collection contains albums of different years.  More general boxed sets can present more issues. Views based on expressions like FirstNotEmpty([Series],[Name]) may help.  It seems MC could use a standard way to handle collections of audio albums which allows them to be fully integrated with views of "true" single-disc and multi-disc albums.  See for example:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,136509.msg945847.html#msg945847

I think my Feature Request would remain useful in many alternate solutions.

2/14/2024 Update 2nd attachment to show sorting by [Disc#] with cleaner folder names used in Thumbnail text.

[markf2748]

TV Series Analogue.
I've tried mimicking how I think MC handles video and TV series artwork (though I don't have actual experience using MC for video and TV).  The hope (wishful thinking) is that since MC also provides [Series] as an audio field, then displaying Series artwork for audio might work analogously to displaying Series artwork for a video or TV series.

1) For the Nina Simone collection, I gave the disks the same [Series] value to create an audio Series.
2) I dropped a Series artwork jpg with Series name for Nina Simone in the collection album folder (described in OP), as well as a folder.jpg file.
3) I added a Series folder containing Series artwork jpg into C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 32\Cover Art.
4) I also dropped the Series folder containing Series artwork jpg into the folder ...\Cover Art\Albums.
5) I created a Series audio view which groups by [Series] at the top level.  The Nina Simone collection shows up there (see attachment).

No luck.  The audio Series artwork is never displayed for Nina Simone.  So I stand by my OP Feature Request, unless someone can suggest something else to try.

An alternative, less preferred by me, would be to store artwork in the Series folder per 3).  That would seem to be analogous to the TV case, according to References 2 & 5 below.

More digging reveals this a known limitation of MC Audio views (see References 3-5).  Please provide a simple solution already.

References:
1. Cover Art wiki page:  https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Cover_Art#How_Images_Are_Stored
2. TV Cover Art forum post:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,124488.msg861871.html#msg861871
3. Handwringing old post for same issue:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,126937.msg880055.html#msg880055
4. Still another request:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,120568.msg833623.html#msg833623
5. Super kluge discussion beyond belief:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,109608.msg758239.html#msg758239

Edit 2/14/2024:  Add references.  Note: In Ref. 5 the idea of a 0 track or short 1 track audio file to hold the image also occurred to me.  I considered it too over the top and burdensome to pursue, even if it did work.  The TV Series analogue actually worked as reported by @Negasonic in Reply #30.  It has not worked for me in MC 32.0.17 (currently in beta) as independently conceived and tested in today's post.  Am I doing something wrong here or has MC changed?