>>I don't follow. [Album artist] is [Artist] if there is no [Album artist] specified.
Can you give a more detailed explanation of what's happening, and what you expect to happen?
OK Matt, I'll try to explain without getting to long and drawn out....
In the ID3 tag, there is a field for Artist and a field for Album Artist. If the Album is by one artist, say David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, then both fields will display David Bowie. When I rip the CD, in options, I choose the Directory Rule of "Artist\Album" and the Filename Rule of "Artist - Name". MJ will create a David Bowie directory and inside, create a Ziggy Stardust folder with all the songs stored as "David Bowie - Name of each song" in that folder. This is the format I use for all my cd ripping.
The problem comes when I have albums with more than one artist such as movie soundtracks or compilation albums (example: "The Greatest Rock Hits of the 70's") With these albums, the Artist field will have the name of the artist for each individual track and the Album Artist field will be "Various Artist" for all tracks. Now when I go to rip this CD using the same options as before, MJ will create a directory for each artist on the album and a folder in that directory with the title of the album and then the file (example: David Bowie/Greatest Rock Hits of the 70's/David Bowie - Suffregette City). I wind up with a directory for each artist on that album when all I want is a directory called Various Artist.
What I would like when I am ripping the albums with "Various Artist" as the album artist, is for MJ to create a directory called "Various Artist" (if one dosn't already exist) and in that directory a folder with the album title and in that folder, all the tracks on that album (example: "Various Artist/Greatest Rock Hits of the 70's/David Bowie - Suffregette City").
By doing it this way, I will have a directory called Various Artist and ALL of the albums that contain various artist will be in that directory. The albums by a single artist will be in a directory bearing the name of that artist. Basically, using the Album Artist field as the directory name, and the Arist field for the filename.
I hope this makes some sense to you as to what I am referring to.
If you can make an extra option in the Directory Rule for "Album Artist\Album" and keep the "Filename rule" as "Artist - Name" then the world would be good.
This should apply to both ripping and burning CD's as well.
Thank you for your patience with me on this.
Chico