Tagging classical music

[rb73]

Here's my approach:

First of all, I dropped the concept of CD/album. When looking for some piece of music to play, I'm not interested in the CD it happened to be on. So, if a CD contains symphonies 39 and 40 by Mozart, the tracks of symphony #39 get the Album tag "KV543 Symphony no.39", and the tracks of symphony #40 get Album tag "KV550 Symphony no.40".

As I was using Twonky until recently, I added the composer and the artist to the Album tag: otherwise all different recordings of "KV543 Symphony no.39" would end up together. I.e. if I happen to have to recordings, under "KV543 ..." Twonky would show two first movements, two second movements, ...
I assume that MinimServer handles this case properly, but haven't had the time to check it. If so I can get back to proper tags for the work (Album).

The tracks are similarly "enriched", for the same purpose of disambiguation. I know, it looks horrible, especially in control points with limited screen real estate, but it was the only way I could figure out to remain sane while using Twonky.

I don't bother changing the track numbers, as their only function to me is to provide a sort order. I don't care if KV550 happens to have track numbers 5-8
If a work happens to be split across multiple CDs I prepend the disc number to the track number, which gives something live 101, 102, ..., 201, 202, ...
If the slightly weird track numbers start bugging me, it wouldn't take much time to normalise them using MP3tag, but I haven't seen the need for that yet

So, if I'm reading things right I don't need to use the Composition tag, because for me a Composition is a single Album. Right?

Of course, with the introduction of MinimServer the world has become a much better place, and I've now started adding Orchestra and Conductor tags.

I already had a Genre tag and a Composer tag, and used the Artist tag for the soloist/main performer.

The Album Artist tag is left empty to separate classical from non-classical stuff.

The Date tag is left empty, as it clashes with the sort order for non-classical music. When looking at non-classical music I prefer to sort Albums by AlbumArtist and then by Date. I used albumSortTags = AlbumArtist,Artist,Composer,Date.
However, for classical music I prefer to see the Albums in alphabetical order, regardless of the Date.
I wonder if there's a way to accomplish this without running separate servers with distinct albumSortTags properties?

Ideally I'd like to use a proper Date for the classical music too, but it's not a major thing for me.

JW