amarok and classical music -- artist v. composer dilema

[Matej Cepl]

Hi,

I have a lot of classical music in my collection and that shows one aspect
of the unfortunate orientation of most music players on pop music --
distinction between Composer and Artist metadata (which IIRC amarok is the
only Linux player to support). I don't have a problem with my Pink Floyd
records (although there distinction between Gilmour's and Waters' music
could be interesting as well), because Artist is "Pink FLoyd" and that's
enough. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this style of "everything is
Artist" continues in the music software still. So for example, I have been
just ripping of my CDs with Brandenburg Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach
which were (really well, BTW) performed by Bath Festival Orchestra
conducted by Yehudi Menuhin. So, this is what I get from CDDB as default
Meta data for the first movement:

Title: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major - Allegro
Artist: Bath Festival Orchestra; Yehudi Menuhin (conductor)
Album: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6, CD 1
Track Number: 1
Genre: Classical
Date: 1995-01-01T00:00:00
Amarok - rediscover your music at http://amarok.kde.org: a#(fl3/,
# What the hell this tag means, and why it has so awful label?
Kde-encoder: kio_audiocd

It is by far not the worst metadata I could get, but still it isn't what I
would like to get (and I understand that amarok probably cannot do much
about that). So I edit metadata for this track to get

Title: Concerto No. 1, F Major - Allegro
Artist: Bath Festival Orchestra; Yehudi Menuhin (conductor)
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
Album: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6
Track Number: 1
CD Number: 1
Genre: Early Music
# that's my personal preference against stashing everything into one
# rather meaningless label "Classical Music"
... rest is the same

However, this attempt to provide meaningful metadata (BTW, I have at least
three versions of Beethoven's 5th Symphony -- division between Composer and
Artist is just crucial there) leads to hell in the Collection browser.
Either I will have collection grouped by Genre/Artist/Album and the I will
have this movement of Bach's concerto shown as Bath Festival Orchestra (not
what I want), or I will have Genre/Composer/Album and then half of my
collection (no, much more than a half) will be under Unknown Composer.

Can I ask for smart grouping "group by Composer, but when there is none,
group by Artist"? That seems to be the only way how to get out of this
problem.

Thanks a lot and sorry for lengthy and chatty message,

Matěj

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