grouping tracks within an album for PLAYBACK purposes

[SalDiVita]

I'm sure this has ben asked before, but I searched the forum and came up empty. I'd appreciate if someone can please point me in the right direction / provide a solution.

I have an album with 9 tracks. I want to set it up so tracks 4-6 always play together and in sequence whenever one of the tracks is selected (manually, or via shuffle / auto-DJ) for playback. Is this possible? How?

(I know the "grouping" field in Tags Editor > Tags > grouping can be used to sort, filter, etc., but my understanding is that it has no impact on grouping for purposes of playback.)

Thank you.

[Pickles7853]

I don't think MusicBee itself can do this.  Could be wrong.
I can only think of a couple of ways at the moment...

This one isn't pretty but should work: Load up an audio processor of choice (think Audacity) and concatenate those tracks together into a single song.  Then create a CUE file to split it up into three tracks, each of which would play the whole thing.  I have never tried this.  It sounds feasible.  But I am not sure a cue file can be set up to play the entire song in each entry.

Alternative: Load up an audio processor of choice (think Audacity) and concatenate those tracks together into a single song. Copy it three times and label them as individual tracks.  You could use virtual tags to override the usual file length in the UI so they would appear to be separate.

There may be other ways... I will think about it.

[hiccup]

Select these tracks, open Tag Editor, tab: Settings, check 'keep tracks in sequence when shuffling'.

[Pickles7853]

always play together and in sequence whenever one of the tracks is selected (manually, or via shuffle / auto-DJ)

Didn't know about that feature.  Interesting.  It only works when shuffling though.  OP also wanted via manual selection...

EDIT:
After more reading about this feature and thinking about, I am on completely on board with hiccup's solution.  It is much better than mine.  It works for both shuffling and auto DJ.  Further, if you are manually choosing a file to play, I think you should have the option to play them in any order you like.  If you want them played in order, simply play the first in the link-chain.

[SalDiVita]

@Pickles7853, @hiccup thank you both for your input /  suggestions.
MB is so feature-rich in some areas that I'm always surprised when there's something basic (IMO) it doesn't do. I'll investigate merging the mp3 files before adding to the library. Audacity may be overkill for my purposes, but there are other tools which might work.

Update: I just experimented with Audio-joiner (https://audio-joiner.com/) and it seems to have worked. The aggregated file size equals the sum of the 3 files separately, so I assume the files weren't compressed.