As I've explained in detail here and there, I solved this problem by abandoning both the standard Album Artist fields. They never helped me so are no longer in my views, though MC does its thing with them anyway.
My solution is simple: One standard field Artist, one custom field Artists (multi-value/list type field).
Artist -- Has the exact artist as stated for the individual track (might be the same for an entire album, might not) so I have this info complete and exactly right. This is what displays during playback, and what I see on my iPod. But it is not a field I ever use to manage my music.
Artists -- Has the artist's name in a standardized format (I like lastname, firstname) so this field is the same across all tracks/albums or even appearances on other albums by the artist, no matter how it was stated on the original recording. This is a multi-artist field so every notable artist on a particular track is listed in this field. This makes it very simple to identify tracks with varying guests artists/duets, and to handle compilation albums and random individual tracks -- and later find them instantly.
My main view for managing music is Artists, which first groups Artists by first letter (A-Z), then within those groups by the Artists field values (in my case, Lastname, Firstname). The really cool thing about using Artists in a view, being a multi-value field, is that MC creates virtual database rows for each name in that field. For instance, if the Artists field has this: "Dido;xyz" denoting two Artists on the track, the track will be listed in the Artists view under D\Dido AND under X\xyz. This makes it easy to see all tracks by "Dido", both solo and with others, and the same for "xyz".
In fact, this capability to use multi-value fields and have them treated as virtual rows in database views is about 95% of the reason I use MC. I finally feel like I'm in control of my large library (80K+ tracks).
I do the same thing, multi-values in a field, then a view based on it, with standard field Keywords, and with custom field Composers (rather than the built-in single-value Composer field).
Author
Topic: Artist vs. Album Artist ..is this a BUG? (Read 4563 times)