Album Artist and Album Artist (Auto)

Most albums have a single artist, like Metallica - Master Of Puppets. All of the tracks on that album are by Metallica.

But what do you do when you have a compilation album, like a soundtrack? Who do you set the artist for for the album? You can set the artist for individual tracks, but if you wanted to play the whole album, who do you search for in a standard Artist/Album view scheme? That album will be listed multiple times, under multiple artist names.

The Album Artist field is used to set an artist for compilation albums.. You can set your own artist for the entire album. Each individual track will still have its own artist, but the album can have an Album Artist that you can browse for in an Album Artist/Album view scheme. So you could set Album Artist to "Soundtrack" or "Various Artists" or whatever.

Album Artist (Auto) is just an easy way to use Album Artist. MC looks at the list or Artists for all the tracks in an Album. If they're all the same, like Metallica, then Album Artist (Auto) is automatically set to Metallica. If all the tracks are different, like on a soundtrack CD, then Album Artist (Auto) is automatically set to "(Multiple Artists)". So if you use Album Artist (Auto) for all of your view schemes instead of Artist, then you can easily browse all of your albums without having multiple artist albums listed multiple times.

The Album Artist field itself becomes just a way to override Album Artist (Auto). If you don't like the default of "(Multiple Artists)", then you can put whatever you want into Album Artist, and MC will use that instead.