Many Classical music pieces are written by the composer as a work containing multiple movements, this is a alternative hierarchy independent of recorded music on an album. For example an album may contain recordings of two complete works by two different composers. As a listener we may wish to find the album and listen to the whole album or just find one of the two works and listen to just that work.
Minimserver has the concept of Groups and Works (aka Compositions) . In its purest sense Groups are simply a way to groups tracks within a particular album. But with regards to Classical music a Group is synonymous with a work, with each track representing a movement and all movements in a a work having the same value for Group .
Work
In the majority of cases the Work field has the same value as the Group field but it is used for a different purpose, if added to the indexTags field it can then be indexed and browsed in the same way as other indexes such as Artist or Date.
MinimServer Group
Without using groups all tracks are listed in track order when you open an album
But with groups we see the groups representing a work when you open the album. This is much clearer, we can clearly see at a glance there are two different works, String Quarter in G minor Op 10 and String Quartet in F major This makes sense because it is more common to play the complete work rather than just one movement of the work
But we can still double click on a group to see the movements contained within, and play individual tracks if we wish.
Although the Group field is not a standard metadata field we have added support for it in SongKong so with SongKong your identified tracks will be automatically grouped by MinimServer with no further configuration needed.
If you don’t want SongKong to group fields just add to the Never modify or add these fields list. The field is called MinimServer Group within SongKong
There are some limitations to groups, all tracks in a group must be listed contiguously within the same album. And if the album is a multi disc album and displayed as a multi disc album, the tracks must be on the same disc, they cannot traverse multiple discs, if this causes an issue we can always display a multi disc album as a single disc album.