I have three discs in one album but i just want to see one image of the album. How do i do that?
I need this functionality too and have managed to get it working. The recommended way to do it is via the Disc # tag, however in MC this is numeric only and I generally want to be able to put strings in there. So I use the Composer tag in my MP3 files to store the disc number (or, as I call it, the Volume, as it doesn't necessarily refer to Discs.)
Note that the Album tag should contain the same value for all tracks across all disks.
In your library views (or DLNA views, whatever server you are using) you then need to set up an additional step after the Album step, this is simply to use the Composer tag (or the Disc # tag if you've decided that the numeric format is good enough for you).
If you use an Expression to set up the view step instead of Library Field then of course you can name the step as Volume rather than leaving it as Composer, so you get the correct headings in the pane and view steps. (All Volumes, instead of All Composers, for example).
MC will then simply provide an extra level after you click on the Album and will present you with 3 "sub albums", each with different artwork if you have specified the artwork differently for each disc in the set.
Note that the disadvantage to this approach is that the extra level will always be presented regardless of whether you've got multiple discs within an album. So in most cases, where you have a single disc in an album, you will get an extraneous level with just one item (saying Disc 1, or Unassigned) that you have to click through. This is the subject of another thread some time ago where I made the suggestion that it should be possible to set an option on each menu item to say whether the item should be skipped if only a single item is returned. I notice that the latest build (159) introduces an enhancement to the APIs to allow this to take place ("SDK: Added the ability for MCWS/v1/Browse/Children to skip levels with only one choice.")
If you are using the web server, then the web clients (WebPlay, WebRemote) already skip levels with only one choice automatically, and this works perfectly, so I only get presented with the Volume level if there are actually multiple discs in the album.
Reasons for wanting to display "sub albums" within a single album? Well, as mentioned in one of the replies above, in a lot of cases it doesn't really matter. If you have a compilation album that is split over 2 CDs simply because of space, then there is no reason to have it split like that in your media library. Unless of course you consider that 40+ tracks in one list is a bit too cumbersome to browse with the client you are using, e.g. an iPod. However, you cannot make the assumption that people should do it this way just to get over a limitation in the product. Here are some real life examples from my music collection which show how useful the feature is and makes browsing of my media library easy and intuitive according to how I personally visualise it and want to index it.
1. Remastered/re-released albums and Bonus CDs. In this case you usually get one CD which is the original album, then an additional CD which is a collection of, maybe, track outtakes or demos, or a live version of the album, or in some other way something that is not part of the original album and is additional. Therefore I want to be able to identify them as something apart from the original album. The fact that it's on 2 physical CDs doesn't matter, I don't care how they were physically presented to me when I bought the album, however I want to group them as two separate LOGICAL volumes. One of "Original Album", the other of "Bonus Tracks", or "Live Version" or whatever. If you also have the original release of the album in your collection you might even want to keep both the original and the remaster in your library because they have different qualities, so using the sub-album approach you could even make just one overarching album and within it three sub-albums, e.g. "Original Release", "Remaster" and "Bonus Tracks", rather than having the album listed twice in your top-level album menu.
2. Boxed sets of maybe 10 (or even more) CDs. Such as one boxed set I've got called "Relaxing with Nature" which is a set of "ambient/background" music with each CD themed to a different aspect of nature. I have another box set of World Music, with each CD coming from a different country. To have 100+ tracks listed under one album with no separation of theming (even if the tracks are actually in the right order) is far too cumbersome to browse. So I have them listed under one album with several sub-albums beneath them, categorised according to the particular "theme". If I didn't do that, how on earth could I or anyone else go to that album, in the mood for some Spanish music, and be able to find the set of tracks that were on the Spanish CD?
3. I have all the Eurovision Song Contest albums (sorry!), about 10 of them, each with 40+ tracks on them, split over 2 CDs. In this case, I have actually combined the two physical CDs in each album into one logical album in my library as it's not particularly important what order the songs are in or which CD they were on. But I took the opportunity to create one big "logical" album called "Eurovision Song Contest" with each year's album appearing as a sub-album or volume beneath the single album. Therefore the 10 Eurovision albums I've got so far (with many more to come!) do not appear as individual albums at the top level and do not clutter my browse tree up, but I just get one entry in my album list. It makes filing so much easier!
Note that the above points also demonstrate exactly why I don't want to use a numeric disc number tag for identifying the sub-album. For each of the categories above, I don't want to be presented with a meaningless list of numbers. I want to be able to name the volumes "Original Album"/"Bonus Tracks", "Rivers"/"Air"/"Animals", "2007 Finland"/"2008 Serbia" etc.
