Split Albums With the Same Name and Artist (American Football)

[permutableprime]

I'm not sure which board would suit this request most, so I apologize if this isn't the right place to bring this up.

I recently noticed an issue displaying albums with identical artist and title info, namely concerning American Football releases.

The band American Football has releases from 1998, 1999, and 2016 all titled "American Football." I believe Musicbee's default behavior is to treat these as a single album, so I first tried adding the year field to my grouping requirements. That seemed to make Musicbee recognize them as separate albums (e.g. in playlists), but the panels still mash them all together:


Unhappy with that result, I set the sort album on each AF album to the format "American Football [yyyy]," changed the year grouping requirement to sort album, and also set the group by field in the bottom panel to sort album:


This still isn't ideal as the albums are not split in the "Album" panel, and I generally want to see albums instead of sort albums in the bottom panel (e.g. "The All Seeing Eye" vs. "All Seeing Eye, The").

Does anyone have a better approach to this? If not, what is the best way to request that Musicbee handle this more gracefully?

[Bee-liever]

Depending on how you have files organised;
under Preferences> Sorting/Grouping> grouping you can either set
"files for each album are organised in their own folder"
or add YYYY to
"the following fields define an album:"
selections

[permutableprime]

Depending on how you have files organised;
under Preferences> Sorting/Grouping> grouping you can either set
"files for each album are organised in their own folder"
or add YYYY to
"the following fields define an album:"
selections

I use Musicbee's file organization feature, so putting each album in its own folder won't work.

I was able to get Musicbee to recognize the albums as separate (I prefer to use the sort album field instead of year), but it still displays them together.

Ideally, for each album recognized by Musicbee, there should be a separate entry in the album panel and another in the bottom panel. Currently, these 3 albums are collapsed into a single menu entry.

Note: I just tested this by renaming another album to match an unrelated album, and they're similarly collapsed into a single entry in the album panel. These had totally different metadata (whereas the AF albums had the same artist), so to me this seems like a bug.

[redwing]

Your first screenshot looks it's grouped by "album". Try group by "album [year]" instead.
Also I think Album & Tracks view and Album Covers view will show them separately as long as you have "year" field added to the album grouping setting.

[Bee-liever]

As both redwing and I have suggested, once you add YYYY into what defines an album (in the preferences panel I pointed out), you can sort and group however you want in the separate views within MB.

I use Musicbee's file organization feature, so putting each album in its own folder won't work.

FYI: I also use Musicbee's file organization feature and have my files sorted so each album is in its' own folder. It is possible to do.