thanks everyone. I think the thing I didn't realize was that by having the album artist blank, that MM was substituting the track artist.

Files to edit did the trick and was fast.

cheers

[quote="cmx"]Nojac...the album artist field has been a pretty big problem here. I have literally thousands of compilation albums Mp3 and m4a. There seem to be a lot of issues. Including, but not limited to the behavior noted in the first post. [/quote]

Yes, we all know about your problems, cmx. You have been hijacking just about every thread about this issue for the last months to show us your screenshots :D

Sorry, I can not help you. Your files probably come from numerous different sources with different tagging qualities. And you expect MM to take care of these.

(Personally I think it ts a good idea to keep all multi-artists compilations in a separate folder. If you did it would take you seconds to tag the AlbumArtist field manually. But this is off topic :wink: )

I am trying to help shmish. I suggest we wait for his reply. :lol:

Nojac...the album artist field has been a pretty big problem here. I have literally thousands of compilation albums Mp3 and m4a. There seem to be a lot of issues. Including, but not limited to the behavior noted in the first post. While the "Files to edit" solution may work in this case...there are many, many more of my albums that DO NOT show up in the "Files To Edit" node.

I truly wish this was no a problem with my files. Here is a quick example of the confusing behavior that happens to many of us...I have never edited the album artist tag at all... WMP handles it the same way as MM3 making the individual artist the "album artist"...other tag editors show that no "album artist" has been defined for any of the tracks on this album:

note that MM2 shows the album artist as "Various".
[img]http://i19.tinypic.com/87b5uue.png[/img]

yet MM3RC-1 shows "La Pregunta" as the album artist
[img]http://i6.tinypic.com/71zr0a0.png[/img]

There is no way I can go thru and rework thousands of tracks and artists on thousands of albums to fit a specific version of MM....I have depended on and expected MM to take care of this. MM2 did an adequate job in handling my files(limited m4a functionality)... things seem to be handled very differently in MM3, YET it looks like MM3 will be very powerful and versitile in this area.

Sorry to be so exhausting in response and I hope I have not confused the issue more...but this is a very big organizational/usage issue for me and I have had a hard time finding any clear info on how things are handled...just wanting to make sure that MM functionality that can be a BIG issue for some is not dismissed.

Any discussion that helps understand MM functionality in this area appreciated...

[quote="cmx"]MM3 itself enters the artist name in the album artist field on compilation albums and creates these problems here in my library.
[/quote]
MM3 has as far as I know never changed the AlbumArtist name of my compilation albums, once I had them tagged correctly. (I always use "Various Artists" in the Album Artist field of these albums)

If the AlbumArt field is empty, different things has happened in different versions of MM. For me this has never been a problem.

And the problem in this thread is the Album Artist field. Should be easy to cure.

Nojac...could there possibly be more to it?

While the "Files To Edit>Multiple Artist Albums" node is excellent and very helpful under some circumstances it does not contain all the problematic albums here on my system. Hopefully shmish's issue is simple and easily taken care of as you describe.

MM3 itself enters the artist name in the album artist field on compilation albums and creates these problems here in my library.

There seems to be ongoing problems in this area that have yet to be addressed in the current release. Here is one of several threads discussing this confusing topic:
[url]http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=110600#110600[/url]

If you want MM to reckognize a multiartist album as one, you will have to change the Album Artist to "Various Artists" for all the tracks.

Check the Files to edit>Multiple Artist Albums node to find these albums, select all the tracks , choose Properties and change the Album Artist field for all in one operation.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or maybe I'm confused on the functionality. On my setup I'm seeing the album artist listed in the tree under the "album" node.

In the example below, I would expect to see only 1 entry for "After Hours Deep House Vol.1" in the album node. However, it looks to me that the entries are being broken into Album + (Album Artist).

[img]http://www.dryfly.ca/public/album1.jpg[/img]