Why not do it all?

Have all the various structures you want, at the same time. And to avoid it taking up a lot of space, have hard links.

Start with the basic structure Artist/Album/Track.

Then have whatever other additional structures you want, and hard link in the files from the basic structure.

It is even possible to automate if you have consistent and normalized tagging. Just write a script that examines embedded metadata and creates hard links accordingly. Takes up very little space.

Of course, you could also use some form of media player that has a database to provide various views of the media.

I keep it simple. Album Artist\Album. I also have a compilation category (stuff like “Various Artists” or “100 relaxing background music”). I tried going more detailed in the past and it became too cumbersome to manage, and software like WinAMP would read the tags and organize how they liked it anyway.

all artists in one large folder and then albums within each artist folder.

This is all I do

Pretty much the same, Artist/Album/Track.flac for those albums that just appeared on my Nas. And for physical media or other non-album collections it’d still be Artist/Collection/Track.flac or Artist/Album[Media]/Track.flac

Ohh, can we have the discussion where we argue if high res is worth the space at all, given that CD-quality is already able to perfectly represent sound to within the limits of human perception?

I am a bad human being: /datapool/hyjal/media/music/${genre-name}/Artist - Album - # - Song Name.file

Just my way of doing it…

I found that I had to create directories with starting letter of the album artist name to make my library usable, then subdir of Artist, and subdir of Album, then file name as song name.
#, A, B, C… I do not really care about source media but may specify it if the content of media differs because of the media (a DVD release has different content than a similarly-named CD release). I don’t care about file format, just dump them all in. I DO NOT allow any videos in my audio collection, but I do allow audio rips from videos.

I end up with
music/A/ABBA/Super_Trouper_1980/Super_Touper.flac

You also want to standardize filenames on things like live versions, remix, alternate versions, bootlegs

You may want to standardize album names with release year, remaster, bonus, japanese version, DVDRip, etc.

music/J/Journey/Arrival_2001_DVD/Dont_Stop_Believin.ogg

You also may want to put a Non-Album_Tracks directory out there and standardize that directory name in each artist directory

music/A/ABBA/Non-Album_Tracks/Boots/1979_Las_Vegas_Aladdin/Waterloo_Live_1979_bootleg.flac

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I have not figured out how to do related artists well. For example should Brian Wilson’s work be under Beach_Boys? Should Geoff Tate be under Queensryche. Should Yes ARW be under Yes? I also americanize any words that have non-american letters such as Queensrÿche, and I replace spaces with _ and slashes with - and remove all parenthesis and apostrophes. Fora few bands, I tend to capitalize: QUEEN, MUSE, AC-DC. I have no idea what to do with bands that change name, Should Starship be under Jefferson Starship, Should Wendy Carlos also have Walter Carlos? Should Emerson, Lake, and Powell be under Emerson, Lake, and Palmer? Should Triumvirate and New Triumvirate be the same?

For movie or musical soundtracks, I do not put under album artist unless that artist is known outside of soundtracks and is highly prevalent on the soundtrack. For example, Blade Runner goes under /music/v/Vangelis/Blade_Runner/, but The Replacement Killers, goes under “/music/r/Replacement_Killlers” … yeah it’s a judgement call.

Also if you aren’t using musicbrainz picard, you need to be using picard for tagging.

/r/datacurator