Classical
MusicBee V3 has a redesigned user interface.
Composers
The main left panel can be used to display composers.
This allows you to filter fast.
Compositions
If you select Beethoven, you get a couple of compositions by other composers as well.
This is because by default entire albums are returned.
Uncheck "Always Show the Entire Album" and you get compostions from the selected composer only.
Display
The main panel offers various ways to display, sort and group the meta data.
Album cover view is one of them.
A single click on an pic tells you the tracks.
The Sort By is a powerful option.
You can customize it.
One of my customizations is by Composer / Opus / Artist.
Gives you a nice overview of all of the compositions including different performances.
Unfortunately MusicBee doesn’t support smart sorting.
Hence you get everything sorted alphabetical so Opus 1 follow by Opus 10, Opus 100, Opus 2, etc.
Very annoying.
Displaying compositions
The display modes using Album of course displays Albums.
No way to display composition.
There is a loophole however.
MusicBee allows you to define what makes an album.
Add Composition to the definition and all your albums are split into compositions.
It will yield what I call “recorded compositions”, the combination of composition and performer.
Removing the Album Artist won’t help you as the composition is still tied to the Album Tittle.
The only way to get a list of unique compositions is using the column browser.
The counts are a bit misleading because I don't have 45 versions of H.109. Keep in mind the count is tracks, not compositions.
Again, this app is in need of smart sorting.
Composer pictures
The pictures you most of the time has to fetch manually from the Internet.
Put the picture in MusicBees default artist picture folder and see to it that the file name is equal to the content of the composer tag.
If needed, the location of the pics can be changed in Preference > Tags
Verdict
MusicBee V3.1 is pretty able to handle classical.
The problem with Classical is to get the tags right.
An option is to use MusicBee and Picard.
An extensve guide by Hiccup:
MANAGING (LEVELS OF) CLASSICAL MUSIC WORKS USING MUSICBEE AND MUSICBRAINZ PICARD