Most people don't know classical music. They think of any musical composition
as a "song," done by a particular "artist"; whoever wrote the song is
irrelevant. Classical music, of course, is the other way around: the composer
comes first, then the title of the composition, and then the artist, and this
is complicated by the fact that many artists may contribute to any one
recording, and any composition may have more than one artist. Moreover, most
classical compositions have more than one section, or movement.

The current collection algorithm of Amarok (and of every other music player
I've found) uses the above method to order things. And for someone like me,
who listenes to classical music almost exclusively, it's virtually useless.

I sort my classical music into directories:
Composer
        Composition
                Artist (perhaps several different versions)
                        Files making up the composition, numbered so they'll play in order
                Artist (another recording)
                        Files
        Composition
                Artist
                        Files
Composer

&c.


This means that the collection browser in Amarok comes up with mostly numbers
for artists and doesn't show titles at all, one has to open each numbered
entry to see what the title is, e.g.:

0912
        | Unknown
          | III. Presto

The one exception to this is when I have an entire album listed with the name
of the artist in the directory; then Amarok will show the whole list of stuff
in the album and the context browser will find the relevant information ...
sometimes. Since the browser is oriented toward the name of the artist, that
will often supercede the name of the composition. Add to this the
complication of albums which contain many different compositions, by the same
or different composers.

This is a really thorny problem, but if you could make a stab at solving it --
perhaps with a separate switch for "classical algorithm" on each directory
added to the collection, or even for an entire collection so that one has one
collection for popular stuff and another for classical ... that would be
REALLY nice and it would make Amarok much more useful.

Thanks 

This is a tricky problem that I think you could ease a little by having correct ID tags.  Try using (and contributing to) Musicbrainz to tag your classical works.  This will help in the Collection Browser, as your artists will be the composers, and the works will be the album title (with the orchestra/artist in parenthesis). 

Perhaps a better solution for you would be to skip the Collection Browser, and use the "Files" tab which uses your directory structure!  This way everything is sorted the way you set it out on your harddrive.  Give it a try.