How to deal with multi disc albums?

[chr0m]

For example, I have a 4 disc compilation. I have used the same album name for each, but set the Discnumber for each disc.
In Navidrome it treats shows it as one album and when I go into the album it shows the tracks for each disc separately. In LMS I'm getting 4 different albums, with no way to tell which one is which. Is this something I can configure, or is that just the way it is at the moment?

I originally had the CD1, CD2, etc in the album, but removed that when I saw how Navidrome handled it, but now it looks like I need to change it back to use LMS lol

Navidrome was annoying me in the way that only album artists are stored in the artists table. LMS doesn't seem to have that issue and will happily include both artists and album artists.

These servers are complex beasts and I appreciate all the effort that goes into them, I guess I'll never be able to have everything I want unless I write my own 😂

[epoupon]

Hello!
It should already be handled. What is the layout on the disk?
Is your album tagged using MusicBrainz IDs? (I guess not)
If not, are all these tags consistent across the discs: album name, album sort name, total disc, and compilation flag?

[chr0m]

Hey! Thanks for the reply.

So it looks like the TOTALDISCS tag needs to be set. It was blank on all of my stuff. I've used mp3tag to tag all of my stuff and that isn't something it handles by default. I manually added a TOTALDISCS tag and made it the same for all 3 discs of a 3 disc set and LMS combined it into one album with 3 discs. Damn, now I have to go and tag everything again lol
Navidrome didn't need the TOTALDISCS tag to be set. Hardly any of my stuff has it :(

I really need to retag everything properly I guess, my tags are ok, they were mostly done manually by me over the years, but there's a few things like this, that certain programs are expecting that I won't have.

Now I need to find the best way to handle art as well, currently I have the album art in the tags, but not sure that is the best way anymore. Plus need to work out the best way to get an artist image in each folder.

So if a musicbrainz id is added will a lot of these issues go away?

Forgot to mention, all my stuff is FLAC

[epoupon]

You are right, you need totaldiscs to be set. Picard puts it by default so I assumed it was quite common.
I added this constraint because of slight album variations that may be put in sub directories and that may share the same name (but not the same custom version/style tags that LMS does not support (yet?)). This may be an improvement (support these tags and reduce the constraints for multi-disc album matching)

With musicbrainz id, a lot of issues go away. It is the best way to properly group/deduplicate everything and properly identify music sent on services like listenbrainz.

You can even use mbid-value.jpg for covers and artist images, whatever the location on your media library, LMS will find and use them.