No question, the slimserver's way of handling tags can be improved.
Starting with supporting multiple instances of the same TAG in
VorbisComments, and proper support of 'ALBUM ARTIST', so people can
choose what to _display_ in the artist field for a various artists
album. At the very least there should be support for different
behaviour when sorting, when displaying, and when cross-referencing.
Above all, it should display what's in the tags, and a "try to find
inconsistencies in tagging" button would be nice.

Oh, and while I'm at it, integrate a masstagging utility, CDDB
support, and a p...

Seriously, there will never be a way to satisfy all people's
preferences with a static model. Why can't slimserver have a tagging
'language' like foobar2000's TAGZ and user customizable format strings
that can use any and all tags in a file? It could be used to customize
how songs / albums / ... are displayed, when a certain tag is to be
considered equal and what to consider part of an album for example.
Basically slimserver should let the user specify how it should expect
files to be tagged, including arbitrary tags. It would allow a
classical music mode that works without the established ALBUM / ARTIST
/ TRACK model. Even consistency checks could be defined that way:
(pseudocode)

if ( ( $num(%artist%) > 1 ) AND ( %album artist% = NULL ) ) assert
"%__filename% - more than one ARTIST tag and ALBUM ARTST not set."

This would require extending the db model to store arbitrary tags, how
difficult is that?

The TAGZ-like language would basically be a sugarcoated subset of perl
+ sql in slimserver's case. I can see regular expressions being
useful. For examples on what such an interface can do see the
capabilities of various "skins" for foobar2000's ColumnsUI out there.

C.
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