Editing - Album Artist Option

[bobbin]

For some unknown reason my M library is now showing all songs by an artist individually in the Artist column on left hand side. For example if  I put Kris Kristofferson as the album artist it does not group the song under his name. Instead duets etc. with KK are all shown as separate listings in the artists column. This is happening across all artists. Tried looking into options but could not find a solution.

[Zak]

That's how it supposed to work. Artist is always Artist (or Display Artist).

It's not clear which Artist "column" you are referring to, but it sounds like you used to have Album Artist displayed but now have Artist.
If a track doesn't have Album Artist specified it will use Artist.

[bobbin]

Referring to "Album Artist" option in the editing section. For example, if you have a duet by artists Elvis Presley & Martina McBride and you want to show the song under Elvis Presley in the song listings I would show Elvis Presley as the album artist. If I didn't do this it would create a separate artist listing as Elvis Presley & Martina McBride. Was working OK until recently.

[psychoadept]

You could accomplish this much more easily by using the multiple artist splitter and displaying Artist in the column browser. You can have a display artist of Elvis Presley & Martina McBride, and use the artist splitter to save Elvis Presley and Martina McBride as separate artist values. Then it will show up under both their names in the column browser.

[bobbin]

Thanks. That sounds like a really good option.

How do you activate/enact the Multiple Artist Splitter.

Checked in preferences/tagging etc. and couldn't find such an option.

[Steven]

How do you activate/enact the Multiple Artist Splitter.

in the tag editor, click the ... button on the right side of the artist input field

[bobbin]

Steven, thanks for that.

This will make it easier/better going forward.

However, the problem I have at present is that where previously the "album Artist" option grouped songs under the artist shown, for some unknown reason they are now shown separately. It will take a long long time to go through the thousands of songs in my library and correct using "multiple splitter tag". Could this have something to do with a "bug" in a particular version of M?

As a M user from the very early days I have never encountered this problem before.

[psychoadept]

I'm not sure why it changed for you, but that is the expected behavior. You can technically enter multiple album artists, but the idea of album artist is to have a single value that applies to a whole album. Artist is the field to use when you want to use multiple separate values.

You can probably automate some of the process with the Additional Tagging and Reporting Tools plugin. Just proceed with caution until you're comfortable with it.