Browsing Multiple Albums with Same Artist and Name

[rmariger]

I have just started tagging my classical collection. I am equating Artist with Composer and Album with Work. I have some Works done by more than one Performer/Conductor. For example, I have three different versions of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto 3. I was careful to be sure that the Album field was precisely the same for all three versions. Also, each movement (song) by the 3 Conductors now has precisely the same title.

I’m surprised by what I see when I browse in SS. Under Bach, each version of the Work shows up as a separate album with the name “Brandenburg Concerto 3.” I was expecting to see only one album with that name, and 12 songs under the Album (4 movements, 3 conductors).

I tried making songs unique by adding the Conductor to the title to see if that would make a difference. It did not.

I have two questions I'd appreciate help with:

(1) Is there a way to get the browse behavior I expected?

(2) How does SS know to divide up the 12 songs that have the album tag “Brandenburg Concerto 3” into the groupings corresponding to the conductor? Did SS make that inference based on the folder structure?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[cjk32]

rmariger wrote:
> (2) How does SS know to divide up the 12 songs that have the album tag
> “Brandenburg Concerto 3” into the groupings corresponding to the
> conductor? Did SS make that inference based on the folder structure?
>
Yes, if the albums are in separate folders, then SlimServer will class
them as separate albums.

[ceejay]

Yes, SS looks at the folder name to determine that these are three different albums.

If you really want SS to treat them as one album then I suppose you could put them all in one folder, though it beats me why you'd want to do that - would you not want, when browsing, to be offered the choice between the three versions and with some clue as to which is which?

Ceejay

[rmariger]

Yes, SS looks at the folder name to determine that these are three different albums.

If you really want SS to treat them as one album then I suppose you could put them all in one folder, though it beats me why you'd want to do that - would you not want, when browsing, to be offered the choice between the three versions and with some clue as to which is which?

Ceejay

My plan was to use CustomScan/CustumTag to add an additional layer (Conductor) between Album and Songs. But I am having second thoughts. I am just getting into Classical and I'm not sure how common it will be that I have the same Work by different Performers. When I do, I expect I will determine a favorite and sideline the others. So I am now leaning toward your scheme, summarized in http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17877&page=3&highlight=archiving+classics

Incidentally, do you ever deviate from your general scheme? For example, I have a 2-CD set of Chopin by a particular performer where all 40-odd tracks are pretty short works. I decided to catalog it all as one album. As another example, would you consider lumping all 6 of Bach's Brandenburg concertos done by one performer (and released as a 2-CD set) as one album?

Randy