I like the fact that the Album Artist feature can unify various incarations of an Artist like:
Baba Brooks
Baba Brooks & His Band
Tribute To Baba Brooks
Using Baba Brooks as Album Artist.
-however there are two reasons I don't; maybe there is a workaround or this is a bug:
1. Once you assign an Artist to the Album Artist field it makes MC claim that as an album, so your Statistics are wrong. Not a big deal if you don't use that feature, but you'll end up with all these albums that don't exist.
I tried to use Album Artist (auto) & Album Artists fields to label a cd as (Multiple Artists) to retain the actual album in Statistics correctly, but to then unify various incarnations of an artists name, tributes, etc
It would be nice to achieve this. The root of the problem may be that in an Album Artist (auto) view scheme all (Multiple Artists) are tucked away in that section. As soon as you label a track (Multiple Artists) it is no longer available under Artist, but it's source is correctly identified as a Muliple Artists Album.
That's why I never use that type very much, but I now use Panes: Genre>Album Artist (auto)>Artist>Album so I can have the best of both worlds at my fingertips i.e. Multi. Artists stashed or all visible in Artist.
Another example is an album that has 20 tracks by the same artist and the last track is the artist with another artist. I just realized the MC considers this a (Multiple Artists) album, intuitive yes, but for me it's not a Mulitple Artists album, I want to consider it an album by that one artist.
To me, compilations e.g. "King Size Ska" are multiple artists albums. Very interesting to notice how MC defines this. I have an album where the artist field differs because it is a DJ who is listed as performing with other artists but he is just singing over their rhythms; it is still the DJ's album and not a multiple artists cd:
U Roy & The Paragons
U Roy & The Slickers
U Roy & The Crystalites
So it works only one way, I want may want to define an album with more than one artist as one artist, but if I have a Multiple Artists cd that has tracks by an artist listed under a monniker for example, I can't unify that
artist under one Album Artist (auto) because I'll lose the definition of that album as a Multi. Artist cd in Statistics; I'll under up with literally thousands of more albums than I have.
I thought I could enter one thing in Album Artist auto (Mult. Artists) & then enter the "unifying" artist or word in the Album Artist field but it didn't work on .95 so I just assume I don't understand these fields at all.
Comments welcome,
Dr. C