Sort albums by year: compilation albums being split up in multiple instances

[MythikAngel]

I recently switched to MusicBee as my default Music Player/Manager. And I've been enjoying it so far, except for one problem I'm having.

I have set my layout to "Albums and Tracks", sorted by year. I've got some complication albums that contain songs from different years. MusicBee treats every year of the song as an new album. What makes my music library really messy. Here are some screenshot of where I'm talking about.

Here the album "Vocaloid Music Collection" starts, and contains every song in it released in 2007.


After all songs from 2007 are listed the album stops, and continues later on with all songs of 2008.


Is there anyway to group all the songs in a single 2007 album when sorting is set to year, just like Winamp and iTunes does?

I would like to keep the year meta-data of all songs, since I also use them with music players that handles it "correctly".

Thanks!

[rivum]

You would need to first sort by "Album artist" instead of artist.  This assumes your album artist is something like "Various Artists".

[MythikAngel]

You would need to first sort by "Album artist" instead of artist.  This assumes your album artist is something like "Various Artists".

Thanks for your reply. I tried sorting Album Artist/Year/Album, but that didn't work sadly...

Is this what you meant?

[psychoadept]

If you aren't already, try using the 3.1 beta from my signature.  It adds an original year field so you can use a consistent year for the album, for sorting, but also store dates for individual tracks or whatever

[EuroMIX]

If you aren't already, try using the 3.1 beta from my signature.  It adds an original year field so you can use a consistent year for the album, for sorting, but also store dates for individual tracks or whatever

This is great. I had the same basic issue, and it's one thing that I thought iTunes handled better than MusicBee because it picks whatever the most recent year is from the tracks in the album and sorts by that, but simply having "track year" and "album year" is a much better solution overall. I just hope that if I modify all my tracks to account for this that it'll end up being useful; a lot of programs only tend to recognise the main year field.

[MythikAngel]

If you aren't already, try using the 3.1 beta from my signature.  It adds an original year field so you can use a consistent year for the album, for sorting, but also store dates for individual tracks or whatever

Thank you! I've installed the beta, went to my complication album, updated the original year field to "2007", and defined custom sorting to "Original Year/ Year/ Album". (This the way you meant right?).

Now the all the tracks are merged into a single album instance. The album shows up at the buttom at the album list, even under 2013 albums, but it's still a lot more organized. Thank you!

[psychoadept]

If you want it to sort correctly with the other albums, swap the contents of year and original year, and just stick with year for sorting.  The reason it sorts at the bottom right now is because MusicBee puts blank values first able only that album has an original year value