On your hard disk, albums are less important - who cares if this MP3 is
part of "Now that's what you might call Fairly Good Rock 17", the
reason that you own it is because it's "Ace of Spades", and it's enough
that MP3index can identify it as such.
So if anyone's interested in pursuing this, I think MP3 is the one to
study, the compression process may even be helpful in some ways. It's
also the thing most users are unlikely to have properly catalogued --
and ID3 tags are often riddled with typos or just plain wrong.
Nick.