Is the collection supposed to be case sensitive? If so, is there a way to turn this off?
Let's say I have two albums. One by "metallica" and another by "Metallica" (big M) then these show up as different artists. Or if I have an album with some songs by "black sabbath" and some other songs on that album by "BLACK SABBATH" then this album shows up under 'various artists'.
This is really annoying...

Why not tag your music correctly. 

See when *I* say this, I get flamed to oblivion

Yeah, tag your music and you'll be fine...

Thanks for the highly informative and useful replies...
Of course I have to retag it. The problem is that if you rip a cd with e.g. Grip the tags are loaded automatically from an online database, as you might know. I would like not having to bother checking whether the case on each letter of the artist I'm going to rip matches entries I already have in my collection or not.

PS:
dangle_wtf : I fully endorse that ! 

You realise you can EDIT the tags in grip before you go ahead and rip your CD? In fact this really is an important step, due to the massive amount of badly spelled, poorly capitalised entries in the freedb.

Yes, I know that. 
That's what I meant by saying I don't want to check the case every time I rip. Spelling is easy to discover. To remember whether the previous rip of metallica was spelled with capital m or not is worse...
And I still don't see any reason why artist names should be distinguished by the case of the letters.

METALLICA is not metallica, therefore it would be a bug to treat them the same. If you're lazy and don't want to take, oh, 3 seconds to fix tags, then deal with it.

I do not agree.
There are certainly different artists/bands with the same name out there, but you usually can't separate them by the case of the letters in their names anyway. And a quick look at my metallica CDs showed that they spell it at least like "METALLICA" and "Metallica". The capitalised version could of course be said to be due to the 'convention' of writing in capitals on CD covers and that metallica is a name and should therefore be written with a capital M.
But what do you do with names with more than one word then? A lot of people write the first letter of each word with a capital letter. Others capitalise the first letter only...

Before this develops into an argument let me say that I am aware that it is very easy to fix this manually as has been pointed out. But as I said; I don't see any problem what so ever in making it easier for the user and ignore the case when distinguishing between artists.

Just a thought:
Since there seem to be no such thing as optional case sensitivity of artist names in the collection and this thread seems to be moving in to a different direction, it probably belongs in the Usability forum. I'll copy the relevant parts of the thread over there and the discussion on whether case sensitive artist names is a feature or a bug can continue over there.

Never trust FreeDB, that database sucks and is one big mess.

I tag everything on my own and therefore never ever had any tag problems...

Hello all,

I also have problems with case sensitivity, although not because of inconsistent tags in my collection, but rather because my tags are not the same case like the last.fm 'related artists'. In my opinion this is a worse problem, because the last.fm band names are often poorly cased, and therefore I definitely don't want to change my tags to fit them.

Greetings

GrimReaper