How does everyone manage multiple versions of the same album (eg I have say the std CD + a High Res Version), do you:
1) Give them different Album Names
2) Try to use Stacks
This original question is a bit old, but I thought I'd chime in quickly... I have two methods:
1. If they are not identical albums and include additional content (ie. a re-release that includes additional tracks) then I give them different Album tags.
2. If they are identical albums other than formatting concerns (ie a multichannel version and a stereo version, an original mono and re-released stereo version, or a FLAC version and a MP3 version) then I use stacks.
Basically, if I want to be able to select and use one of the versions as my "default play" type, and I only want to keep those additional versions for "special purposes or circumstances" then I use stacks. If it contains different content, then it is a different album as far as I'm concerned. Mostly, things end up working well with stacks (type #2). A good example would be the Pink Floyd reissue of Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I had the original mono release for a long time. Then they re-released a "remastered stereo-expanded version". I'm not a purist and so I listened to the new version and liked it, so I stacked it "on top of" my original mono version of the same album. I wanted to keep the mono version just for good measure, but I didn't really need to use it very often, it was mostly kept for archive and completeness purposes.
A good counter example I've run into a lot is my largish collection of Aphex Twin/Richard D James stuff. He constantly issued different versions of albums for different places (Japan vs US vs Europe), or even sometimes just with different labels (the BMG version of RDJ The Album was quite different from the "original" release). These versions were often substantially different from one another, including different tracks, with tracks in different orders, or even divided up into multiple discs differently (and in a few cases, tracks with the same song "title" were actually quite different songs). These, where I have the different versions, get tagged with separate album tags.
Lastly, I'll occasionally do a "hybrid approach". If an album is re-released with identical content but then has a bunch of "bonus tracks" tacked onto the end, I usually only keep the extended version. However, if there is a reason to keep the original version (the subsequent release was remastered, for example) then I'll lop off the "bonus tracks" and tag them as a separate album, and stack the versions of the "original album".
Stacks are nice because you can choose which of the versions you like best and then stack that on top. In some cases, remastering makes things worse. In those cases, it might be nice to have the remastered version for some reason (maybe one or two tracks are good), but then I'll stack the original on top because that's the experience I generally want when I just play the songs.