Ok, well I tried and that does work, however it's a bit misleading and "clunky" as the option is "Album and Tracks" not "Album Artist and Tracks"; and I have never used "Album Artist" in any of my 10's of thousands of tags. It's always just Artist. And Album.. Independently.
It's not at all clunky. It's by design. Understand that MB is a music
manager first and a music player second. In order to properly manage a user's music library, Album Artist is a necessary tag.
How many of your tens of thousands of tags are compilation albums? If you don't use Album Artist with compilations, you'll experience exactly what you're seeing - each artist is considered it's own album.
So instead of having to go and retag this plethora of files, would it not be better if MusicBee offered an option to ignore the Album Artist and just properly group the "Playing Tracks" by "Album and Track" as the name of the option implies?
"Albums and Tracks" is a view. MB does not know that sixteen different artists are part of one album unless there is an Album Artist (such as Various Artists.)
Seems like an error in the programming and backwards to require the user to retag the music just for the option to work correctly.
It is not an error is programming and nothing is
requiring you to retag if you don't want to. But if you want MB to work correctly, then yes, you need to retag. You can do many albums at once. Select your compilation albums, open the tag editor, and type "Various Artists' in the Album Artist field and you're done. I do suggest that you test it with a few albums first. But you already have tried it and said that it works.
It would seem the real purpose of the "Album and Track" option is to properly group by album with only one copy of the artwork and album info. And it isn't doing that consistently.
It certainly does it consistently if you tag it properly. Which you don't seem to want to do.
You should take a look at the Sorting/Grouping preferences and play around with the option for "the following fields define an album." You'll notice that Album Artist is fixed as the first field.