Not sure I fully understand what you're looking for but...

What I do in iTunes is the same as you with the album title as SOTT #:
Album title except I have the artist set to the actual artist name.

On the screen you use to edit the tags there is a drop down box called
Compilation, choose Yes in this. If you let iTunes arrange your
windows folder structure this will stick the album under a folder
called 'compilations' and not create seperate new folders for every
artist.

Don't see why you would have problems searching with this setup.
Remember you can drop down the search box in the top right of iTunes
so you can choose if you want to search by artist, album or song. You
can also click on the column headings at the top of the iTunes window
to order by artist, song, album, track length or whatever.

I'm also currently encoding all my CD's to mp3. Just passed the 500
mark last night, haven't been able to face doing the SOTT's yet though
(4 or 5 rounds worth). With normal CD's I can get the tracklist from
CDDB but the SOTT's all have to be typed by hand which is a big job. I
have a proportion done from when I first got them but there are still
quite a lot to do.

Mark


On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 10:56:48 -0400, Kevin Gandel <oddsmanink@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> sorry for a slightly off-topic question, but here goes.
> 
> I'm in the process of encoding all my CDs as mp3s for playing on my computer, IPOD and networked DVD player.
> The IPOD and DVD player rely heavily on ID3 tags.
> 
> Now, for your regular CD, thats no problem.  All the songs on the CD are by the same artist so they get
> lumped together by artist and on the correct album under all the correct headings.
> 
> The problem i'm running into is on compilation CDs or mix CD (such as SOTT).  I want to keep the songs together on their respective albums while searching, yet also want the ID3 tag to display the correct artist.
> 
> The way I have been doing it now is the following:
> 
> Artist:  SOTT
> Album Title:  SOTT #: _Album Title_
> Song Title:  _artists_ - _song title_
> 
> This is great for searching for the specific SOTT album, but sucks when trying to find a specifric song by a specific artists.
> However, I like this type of organization.
> 
> So my question....is there a way with ID3 tags to mark that something is part of a compilation and have them all lumped together under the same artist/album when doing a search?  yet the ID3 tags will display the actual artist info correctly (instead of just SOTT as I have it now).
> 
> at home I use iTunes and Winamp.  I rip with CDEx and use TagScanner and iTunes to edit tags.
> 
> thanks!
> 
> -kev
>