multi-genre and a genre hierarchy

[adrian]

I've started ripping my CD collection and am wondering about how I can accomplish certain types of things. I'm new to the world of music liberated from plastic discs, so I'm trying to figure things out. I have a collection of traditional ("folk") music. Some is vocal, some is fiddle, some is pipes, or whistle. Additionally some is from the USA, some is Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton, French, Spanish, etc.

I would ideally like to be able to tag music as "folk,instrumental,fiddle,french", for example. With everything tagged like this I might ask to see the Scottish fiddle music. That would requires restricting the music by two genres. But it appears that I can only restrict by genre once. I'd like to be able to play in random order just fiddle music, or just music from Cape Breton, or just fiddle music from Cape Breton.

It seems like there is not really any support for handling multiple genres in this fashion. Is that correct? (I don't want to launch into a big tagging effort that won't be useful.) How would I do what I want? Do I need to maintain a collection of play lists for every combination of interest?