Just my two cents ... most people want tracks grouped by Album .. as such [Album Artist] would be the key field to sort and group albums by. So as the OP found out this field must be populated with the same input for all tracks other wise, at least with standard out of the box views, the albums are split. Another thing to bare in mind are multiple cd albums. As the disk number is (or should be) retained retained in the tag and in the library for sorting purposes, there is (for most people) no reason to have three distint albums for Woodstock as an example. I often see people posting screen shots of this. The simple way like album artist is to select all tracks and use one title for all three cds removing disk1 etc.
But once you get the hang of what the JRiver database can do, what I think is important is to be consistent. This is more logical, easier to build and change views around, and easy to totally change. Using the name of the album like ssands suggested I would not recommend, for a couple of reasons ... one is consistency.
Basically, "Various Artists" is often used or JRiver defaults to "Multiple Artist" in the [Album Artist] field (if you are using the Artist (auto) field which fills it in automatically) for all multiple artist albums would then have the same album artist tag. Or you could use zzzVarious whatever, so all of your various artist albums would fall to the bottom. Whether or not you prefer to make or use views with artist or album artist would give slightly different results.
I personally only use two tags for multiple artist albums "Various Artists" and "Various Composers" for classical, although I know some people use Soundtrack as album artist; doubling up meta data like the album name as the album artist name can get a bit sticky later as the collection gets larger, imo.
It is also doable to have multiple artists per track using a semi colon as a separator, as well as multiple album artists.
As for the Elliot Smith example if Heatmiser and Elliot Smith were artist on every track ing the album, the album would automatically be grouped together. However if Heatmiser is indicated on only 2 out of twelve tracks it will break the album grouping as the OP noticed. So either you remove Heatmiser or it has to be added as an artist on all tracks.
What I do as a work around is to put "Heatmiser" as a soloist for the tracks in question. That way using a search you can always find where they are playing. This is really important in jazz where the sidemen are often just as important as the leading artist.
PS- @ssands I thought I had all the elliot smith albums and all the heatmiser albums; what album indicates both artists seen as how Heatmiser really precedes his solo work? Or is this a compilation/best of? just curious thx
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Topic: Songs from same album showing up as multiple albums (Read 2704 times)