Series of Albums continue to list as one album, many tracks.

[RBEmerson]

I have a collection of B. B. King albums that for some reason are treated as tracks in under the first "track's" name.

I checked that each album file is headed with the correct, unique album title, with the artist title spelled as "B. B. King" (I had a few mislabeled as "B.  B. King" (excess blank between the leading B.) I straightened that out. I corrected "B.B. King". Nonetheless, only one album title appears - "B. B. King - Japan Blues Carnival", ignoring, for examples, "B. B. King - Live in Bonn or "B. B. King - Live in Hamburg".

Is there a way to refresh the listings, hoping the one "album" splits into the collection of unique album names?

[hiccup]

Have you checked that the tracks adhere to the rules as (you have) set to get them grouped as an album under: Preferences > Sorting/Grouping > grouping?
And, some explanatory screenshots would probably be helpful.

[RBEmerson]

RE: Screensht - I'd post one in a heartbeat if I didn't have to register, etc. for Imagur. If there's an alternate way to post a screenshot, the file's waiting to be posted.

OK, whinging about Imagur done...
Loosely, here's what I have currently. The 1 is the track number for each album. There should be (using this sample) three albums of 1 track each. Instead, there's one album. The entry in Album for each file seems to be ignored.

Japan Blues Carnival
    1 Japan Blues Carnival
    1 B. B. King - Live in Bonn
    1 B. B. King - Live in Hamburg

Some slight progress. "Japan Blues Carnival", "B.B. King - Live in Bonn", etc.  are the name of the only track in each album. That is, album "Japan Blues Carnival" has one track, called "Japan Blues Carnival". I changed a track name, and the list of album titles is the name of the first and only track.

However, the entry for each album is filled with "Japan Blues Carnival",etc. Using the short sample above, There should be an album heading like this:
Japan Blues Carnival
   1 Japan Blues Carnival

B. B. King - Live in Bonn
   1 B. B. King - Live in Bonn

B. B. King - Live in Hamburg
   1 B. B. King - Live in Hamburg

There is nothing like this under artist B. B. King

[Zak]

RE: Screensht - I'd post one in a heartbeat if I didn't have to register, etc. for Imagur. If there's an alternate way to post a screenshot, the file's waiting to be posted.

You don't have to register with Imgur to upload a one-off photo. Just click the New Post link in the top-left corner.

imgur.com/upload

[RBEmerson]

I thnk I've got this grab in the right place...



Huh? I don't see this in preview. Try this URL... https://imgur.com/a/xPfipXL  OK, the link works for Imagur knows how long...

[Zak]

The only way I can replicate this is by specifying that albums are stored in separate folders.
This is done using the settings mentioned in the first reply:



If you have the first option selected, it won't matter what the album tag is.
That's a workaround for people that haven't tagged their files correctly, and probably isn't what you want.

If it isn't that, click the Album and Tracks heading shown in your screenshot, select Customise Panel... and post a screenshot of those settings.

[phred]

I corrected "B.B. King".

This won't fix your issue, but Mr. King spells his name as "B.B. King" (no space between the first and second 'B'. It's that way on the official B.B. King website and in just about all other sites that reference his body of works.

[psychoadept]

I think hiccup and Zak are on the right track, this is a sorting/grouping problem.  If your sort order is Album Artist/Album and Zak's suggetion doesn't help, one other thing to check would be the Sort Album field on the Sorting tab of the tag editor.

[RBEmerson]

[original post text deleted]

Problem solved - it was the sorting settings. I changed to sorting by filename, then folder name  Oddly "album name" is grayed out. Why is that?

[psychoadept]

[original post text deleted]

Problem solved - it was the sorting settings. I changed to sorting by filename, then folder name  Oddly "album name" is grayed out. Why is that?

Are you talking about the bottom of the sorting/grouping preferences?  Those are the fields that MusicBee uses when deciding what constitutes an album. Album Name is required, Album Artist is strongly recommended, other fields are optional.

If that's not it, can you give us a screenshot? Thanks.

[Zak]

Oddly "album name" is grayed out. Why is that?

Kinda self-explanatory. If you use tags to distinguish between albums, it wouldn't make sense for the album title not to be one of them.

Though why it is second on the list, I don't know.

Problem solved - it was the sorting settings. I changed to sorting by filename...

Wait. You added Filename to the list of fields that define an album?  

That may fix the issue for your B.B. King albums - because each album is a separate file - but if you have other "normal" albums where each track is a separate file, you will have borked how they are shown.

If you have changed from the first radio option to the second, there should be no need for you to add anything besides the non-optional Album Name tag (and probably Album Artist so every "Greatest Hits" album isn't grouped together).

[RBEmerson]

OK, understand why that field's grayed out. It wasn't clear to me whether it was used or not.

[RBEmerson]

Indeed, I did cleverly turn every every track in other albums into "albums". I fixed that, too.

One oddity showed up that I don't understand. I had a directory full of albums where the "Album" tag was blank (very odd  - dunno why I didn't includ the Album title when I used MP3Tag to put in song titles, artist's name. Anyway, I corrected that but the album title wasn't listed, just the songs with the right track no. and year.

I deleted the artist altogether, then hit INSERT. The album tags were filled out, but not shown bold letters above tracks. Somehow I bumbled into getting them displayed. The question is "is there a way to fully refresh the albums under any one artist's name?" (Think of the equivalent of hitting F5 to refresh whatever's being shown in Windows Explorer)

[psychoadept]

Unless you've changed your hotkeys, I believe F5 is refresh in MusicBee, too.

[RBEmerson]

So it is! Worked like a charm. Thanks!