since cvs on 1/4/06, various artist albums in my music have been incorrectly listed as multiple albums by single artists. this is probably the result of this change:
"01/04/2006 [13:46:09] _Bavarian added the following change: fixing 020: Music database does not support 2 albums with same name"
this highlights a problem that's come up a few times before - if albums are grouped on the album name alone, then having two albums with the same name but different artists will incorrectly lump the two albums together. grouping by both album name and artist name (which the latest cvs's do) fixes this, but in the process it means compilations with more then one artist are split into multiple albums for each artist!
here's a screenshot - this is only one compilation album but appears multiple times, once for each artist
i think the only way to get around this is to add support for the 'album artist' (or 'ALBUMARTIST' or 'AlbumArtist') tag. imo this is one of the few things wmp/mce does right
For compilations this tag is set to "Various Artists", and the individual tracks still have their artists stored in the normal artist tag. It also has the advantage of being able to sort albums more neatly when they have a lot of tracks with artist tags like 'The Herd (feat. Jane Tyrell)' instead of just 'The Herd' - you can leave all the artist tags with the extra credits but just set the album artist tag as 'The Herd', so these tracks still get grouped together correctly.
"01/04/2006 [13:46:09] _Bavarian added the following change: fixing 020: Music database does not support 2 albums with same name"
this highlights a problem that's come up a few times before - if albums are grouped on the album name alone, then having two albums with the same name but different artists will incorrectly lump the two albums together. grouping by both album name and artist name (which the latest cvs's do) fixes this, but in the process it means compilations with more then one artist are split into multiple albums for each artist!
here's a screenshot - this is only one compilation album but appears multiple times, once for each artist
i think the only way to get around this is to add support for the 'album artist' (or 'ALBUMARTIST' or 'AlbumArtist') tag. imo this is one of the few things wmp/mce does right
For compilations this tag is set to "Various Artists", and the individual tracks still have their artists stored in the normal artist tag. It also has the advantage of being able to sort albums more neatly when they have a lot of tracks with artist tags like 'The Herd (feat. Jane Tyrell)' instead of just 'The Herd' - you can leave all the artist tags with the extra credits but just set the album artist tag as 'The Herd', so these tracks still get grouped together correctly. 
