What is the recommended way to handle Multi-Artist albums with id3v1? My creative zen vision:m apparently only handles id3v1 so I don't have access to things like VA Artist and other extra tags.

ID3v1.1 is limited in the fields available: Artist, Title, Album, Year, Genre, Track #, Comments.

I don't think you will be able to make your mp3 player understand that an album is multi-artist, but you could alway put the CD-artist in the comments field. Nothing else you can do I'm afraid.

What I do is put the album artist (or compilation, soundtrack, etc.) in the ARTIST field, and format the TITLE field using "%artist% - %title%", where artist is the song artist. As a matter of personal preference I format all my tagging this way, both id3v1 and v2.

For example, I just ripped the new Idol Tryouts compilation from Ghostly International, and my tagging for a track looks like this:

ARTIST = Ghostly International
TITLE = Dabrye - Magic Says

Your only limitation in your case would be the number of characters allowed in id3v1 tags (max. 30 in artist and album fields).