AlbumArtist Issues - creates more Albums

[Pastim]

I have, in some cases, multiple AlbumArtist tags. I'm aware that issues with this have been raised before, but one of the solutions has created a separate issue for me that I've lived with, but would rather not if I can help it. Apologies if I have asked something similar in the past.

To get multiple AlbumArtist tags to be shown properly, one solution is to alias it, eg:

Code:

aliasTags - AlbumArtist:MainArtist

and to get back to the normal name for display:

Code:

indexTags - MainArtist:AlbumArtist

This works, but has an unfortunate side effect of defeating the 'mergeFolderAlbums' logic. I therefore end up with multiple albums wherever I have split an album between folders, since the 'same AlbumArtist' logic fails. My folders are organised by composers, works and workartists, so I have loads of effectively duplicate albums, even though the AlbumArtist is the same and the track and disc numbers are correct for one album.

If I don't use the alias, I get much the same number of albums as I expect (a few more than foobar2000 or LMS say there are, but only a handful for reasons I don't yet comprehend), but I get many 'unknown' AlbumArtists where there are multiples.

If I use the alias I get around double the number of albums I expect, but I do get to see all the individual AlbumArtists.

Is there a solution?

I'm aware I have not discussed other tags here, such as Artist. The reason for that is that I use AlbumArtist quite specifically to mean the key Artist or Artists that appear on every track of the Album. These Artists are duplicated in my Artist tags, along with others who only take part in a few tracks.