The "Album-Song" organisational metaphor just doesn't work for classical music. However they could do quite a lot with the current metadata: grouping tracks using prefixes etc.
One of my biggest gripes is that searches often return individual "songs", whereas for classical music you're generally looking for something that spans multiple tracks (and so what to see more context in the search output).
I've been frustrated about this for quite a while. About a year ago, I decided that I should just try to roll my own (just for me, using my music collection).
- prefix grouping (so that Symphonies/Concertos etc are automatically grouped together, and the groupings transfer into playlists etc - so you can queue a whole symphony at once).
- enumeration detection.
- splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist).
- reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!).
- store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store.
- web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio.
Amongst the things that are still in the "plan":
- gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy).
- Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices).
- many more things!
I did the same thing. I solved gapless playback by generating XSPF files and letting a local media player do all the legwork; getting HTML5 to do it seems a little way off.
At the moment I'm messing with some simple Machine Learning to better detect things like "Johannes Brahms" == "Brahms, Johannes" == "Brahms" for names in composer/artist fields.
One of my biggest gripes is that searches often return individual "songs", whereas for classical music you're generally looking for something that spans multiple tracks (and so what to see more context in the search output).