Boxed sets - Top level grouping

[Servatius]

(12-05-2016 21:55)simoncn Wrote:  

(08-05-2016 17:53)MikeL Wrote:  However the Bach Edition by Brilliant classics that I am working through now has different cover art for each disc, and I find visually scanning the album covers very quick and easy. There are a lot to have at top level, though. Unless I am missing a trick, using DISCNUM & DISICSUBT would mean visually scanning a very long track list and reading the text of each DISCSUBTITLE to find what I want (or can each DISCSUBTITLE be collapsed under its own cover art?)

I have looked at this set on the Brilliant Classics website. There is not much information but I have the impression that it is a packaged bundle of other albums that are also available separately. It appears that some of these other albums are multidisc albums. This would mean that this box set is different from a multidisc album whose discs contain material that is unique to the album and cannot fit on a single physical CD.

If the above understanding is correct, this difference suggests to me that there would be some value in having MinimServer support the concept of "box set" or "album set" in a way that is different from a multidisc album. I will give this some further thought.

Except for the album art, a solution could be to improve how the DISCSUBTITLE and GROUP tags work together.

Currently, when DISCSUBTITLE is set to the same value for multiple discs of an album, each disc is shown separately under its own heading, and groups must not span multiple discs (which they can if disc information is not displayed).

Couldn't this be extended by combining multiple consecutive discs of an album with the same value in the DISCSUBTITLE tag under the same disc information heading? And by allowing a group to span multiple consecutive discs having the same DISCSUBTITLE value? Track renumbering could be done separately within each of those disc sets.

As an example, if the box set consists of two albums A (with disc 1 and 2) and B (with disc 3 and 4), the same ALBUM tag could be used for the complete box set, a value of DISCSUBTITLE=A could be used for album A and DISCSUBTITLE=B for album B, and the GROUP tag could be used for grouping works across discs but not across albums. For me this looks like a good combination of existing concepts (that cannot be used together with a satisfying result at the moment).

A second useful extension would be to allow for suppressing the tracks/groups beneath the >> disc subtitle headings, e.g. when the value in DISCSUBTITLE starts with ">>". So instead of scrolling through a long list only the headings for each album in the box set would be shown and could be selected.