>- If the single tracks are stored -elsewhere-, no »artist list« will
> appear. (Mine are usually stored under the artist folder, even for
> compilations, since I want to know -all- titles I have from any
> single artist. Compilations are »held together« by playlists, or SC
> logic.)
It's not a good storage model to physically store tracks under separate
artist/album/song heirarchies, as you've discovered. Rip and store albums
together. I got very annoyed with my first experience of iTunes (was setting
it up for my wife), when it decided to restructure my music which was ripped
and stored per-album, into per-artist structure, even for compilations.
>- VA Albums seem to be »detected« somehow by SC by comparing Album
> Artist, Album Name, and other frames (Year and Date?). This often
> leads to VA albums being shown as many »albums« of one track each.
Songs are considered to be part of an album if the album name matches.
An album is only automatically considered to be a VA album if there NO album
artist AND are different artists on the songs. Year and Date don't come in to
it at all.
An album can be tagged as a compilation or not a compilation using compilation
tags, to override any cases where the behaviour is not what you intend.
SC assumes songs by artists in different folders are different albums for a
very good reason, which is widely regarded "The Greatest Hits" problem.
If you have a folder structure such as:
Music\
Queen\
Greatest Hits\
<Songs with tags ARTIST=Queen, ALBUM=Greatest Hits>
Squeeze
Greatest Hits\
<Songs with tags ARTIST=Sqeeze, ALBUM=Greatest Hits>
Is that one compilation album called "Greatest Hits" containing songs by
Squeeze and Queen, or an album by Queen called Greatest Hits and another album
by Squeeze called Greatest Hits?
If you look at just the tags, or by folder structure, you could not beyond all
reasonable doubt decide one way or the other.
SC will by default regard this as two separate albums. In most cases, this is
what was desired by most users.
If it really is meant to be a compilation, adding a compilation=1 tag would
cause all songs with the compilation=1 tag and the same album name to be joined
onto one album.
If you had two compilation albums with the same name, with tracks stored
per-artist, then how would the software know which ones to join into two
compilation albums and not one?
[Okay, so the scanner could perhaps try to be clever and look at other tags,
such as year and track numbers, but it would then also need to consider disc
numbers, and cases where there's no track numbers. Rules could become complex,
hard to describe and understand, and scanning could be slower].
The best thing is to store all tracks from the same compilation in the same
folder. Then there's no special tagging required (unless you add an album
artist=Various Artists tag, thus needing a Compilation=1 to tell SC that it
really is a compilation).
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