I'm currently setting up a database for my albums, and I'm wondering about ones like The MGM Soundtrack Treasury and Superman: The Music 1978-1988. Would these qualify as one album each or several (the former has 20, while the latter has five projects all told)?
I'm not sure what type of cataloging you are doing but if its Software based, there might be a Grouping or a Box set field. So that you enter in each album individually, but name the Grouping field the name of the actual box set for each album. If you're just placing them on the shelf, place the whole box alphabetically with the rest of your CDs........well thats how I do it.
In my case the first consideration is "what is it?', then "who is the performer?". Then I categorize from there.
So for me it looks something like this: Soundtracks Superman-The Music (2007) Various Artists Disc 1-Superman (1978) John Williams
I loath having to be so picky about categorization (not to mention needing to use so many characters in the path line on the PC), but most of the time a librarian mindset is the only way.
For film scores, I alphabetize everything by name of the release - therefore, "Superman: The Music" is classified as its own release, as would something like the "Elfman/Burton Box." I used to sort film scores like I do pop music - by composer, and then chronologically within that subset - but then it became too difficult - I had a giant "various artists" section due to compilations like the abovementioned, plus songtracks that only had a few score tracks.
This is an interesting question because I don't have a lot of box sets that I had to tag. One approach could be to give them the name of the box set itself such as: Box Set Disc 1 Box Set Disc 2 Then you'd have to figure out somewhere in the title tag where you can include information about the specific soundtrack title. This is a broader version of what I tend to do with Kritzerland double releases. While I could separate them out and just tag each one separately, I frequently tag them together, especially if they are by the same artist.
So in the ideal situation, each one would have a Main Title and End Title track so I can put the name of the soundtrack in parenthesis. You could expand this approach out to a bigger box set and then it becomes a question of preference as to whether you like to combine a box set into a single album entry or have each disc appear separately in the list.
I tend to err on the side of combining all the discs together into a single entry but anything over five discs can become a bit of a pain.
With something like The Superman Box, where there are more than 2 composers represented, I would generally prefer to have each work split and tagged separate because it drives me nuts to have music tagged Various Artists unless it is a compilation that I created myself.
