Dan:  unless this is trivial, let's punt post-6.1  What do you think?

To have this option working for album titles would be very handy for classical
albums. If you have for example an album with "Beethoven, Ludwig van - Symphony
Nr. 1" (comprising serveral movements) and "Schubert, Franz - Symphony Nr. 4"
(comprising several movements) on it, you simply have to tag the album as
"Beethoven, Ludwig van - Symphony Nr. 1; Schubert, Franz - Symphony Nr. 4",
define ";" as separator and you can browse to both symphonies separatly. Without
this option you are not able to browse to the second symphony (and browse title
does not help since there you find only the single movements which may be titled
"Adagio..." or so on.

So for classical albums this option would really be great to have soon (not only
post-6.1).

Dieter

*** Bug 421 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This isn't a trivial fix.

would this not work with existing features just by ripping each symphony to it's
own file?  Each could the be tagged as an album, and the multi-genre tags could
be set to allow you to browse under 'classical' or as some grouping that would
tie them together in the same way that the manufacturer did for putting them
onto the same album release.

I was already thinking about tagging each symphony as separate "album". This
would probably have almost the same effect as using a separator in the complete
original album name. 

I did not completely understand what you mean by "and the multi-genre tags could
be set to allow you to browse under 'classical' or as some grouping that would
tie them together in the same way that the manufacturer did for putting them
onto the same album release". Could you explain that?

Tagging of classical albums was and is always a problem for me. I am thinking
about it for a long time (long before I had my first squeezebox) and have not
yet decided how to do it. The problem is that the normal tagging schemes are not
prepared for classical music but for pop/rock music since it is track oriented.
In classical music there is very often a level between album and track names,
namly if you have e.g. a symphony or a sonate having a plurality of movements.
But there are also classical pieces which have no movements (e.g. single piano
pieces or arias). Consicer for example an album with two symphonies (each having
three movements) and in addition with one single piano piece (e.g. "Für Elise"
by Beethoven). If I tag both symphonies as separate albums I can browse to them
through "Browse Albums" but in the album list the further piece "Für Elise" is
not shown. This is only listed in the "Browse Songs" list but in this list not
the symphony names (like "Symphony No. 5") is shown but the movement names of
this symphony (like "Adagio", "Allegro" or so on).

I would prefer to have a browse list in which the "characterizing" name of the
piece is shown which may in some cases be the track name (like "Für Elise") but
in some cases the (reduced) album name (like "Symphony No. 5"). 

And it seems also to be necessary to see the composer name in addition to the
"Symphony No. 5") since there are a lot of different "Symphonies No. 5" by
different composers. So in general, for classical music the composer is much
more important than the interpret which is also different to pop music. If I set
in Slimserver the setting that the artist should be shown with the album name at
the moment the artist is shown but not the composer which is not the desired result.

All these problems cause that I have ripped almost all my pop CDs but none of my
classical CDs until now (only some for testing). It is already a big advance
that you can setup slimserver to include the composer when browsing and
searching for artists but that's not enough to handle classical music as
smoothly as I would like to have it. I have the (very callow) opinion that there
could for example be a kind of flag characterizing classical music (the genre
classical is not sufficient since other people may use different classical
genres like baroque, opera...) controling a different behavior for these tracks.
And there could be the possibility to indicate whether the "album name" (for
symphonies) or the track name (for single pieces) should be listed in the Browse
Songs list. It may even be better to have a separate browse classical list to
separate this completely from the normal browse behavior.

You see, handling of classical music is not so easy and the above are only my
unsorted thoughts to this problem. If you have already found a working solution
how to handle classical music properly I would really appreciat if you could
share it.

well, I was trying to figure out why you would have two completely unrelated symphonies on a single 
album.  If it isn't simply a compilation, you could still group them using the genre tagging.  if you give 
the two symphonies an extra genre, that is unique to the two symphonies, then you can search or 
select the two as a group.  If this is never needed, then disregard that part of the suggestion :)

I think giving two symphonies an extra genre would lead to MANY genres and is
not practicable. Very often classical CDs contain two symphonies, sonatas or the
like of the same or of different composers. Sometimes the orchestra/conductor is
the same and sometimes different. So I think that the term "compilation" as
defined for pop albums is very often not applicable for classical albums. 

At the moment I really think it is the best approach to split the contents of a
CD-album into different "virtual" albums each representing e.g. a symphony or
sonata. My first approach was to use the "multiple items in tags" for albums but
I can also set the different albums manually. But as described that is only part
of the solution since then single classical pieces are listed on track leve but
classical pieces having several movements (like symphonies, sonatas...) are
listed on album level. 

And there are further kind of albums like operas or albums which are
execptionally assigned to the artist instead of the composer (like "Horowitz in
Moscow") which have also to fit in a classical scheme...

Having "multiple items in tag" also working for album titles would also enable to define "virtual albums". For example, if you have several albums of The Beatles you can create a "My Best of the Beatles" album by simple adding to your favourite Beatles songs of different albums an additional album tag comprising "My Best of the Beatles" (in addition to the original album name). You will then have an album "My Best of the Beatles" which is in fact a selection of your complete Beatles albums. That would be great!

How does this bug differ from bug 2553, which has been marked WONTFIX?