How to best organise your music?

[simbun]

What a question!
If you ask 10 different people you'll get 10 different answers, but I'll at least start the ball rolling, but know that if you ask me tomorrow it'll probably be a different answer, so be prepared to constantly evolve, as you won't get it right first time (from experience).

With the structures you propose, and your comments alongside them I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective. The structure (from a navigation perspective) is almost irrelavent, it's your tags (and MinimServer) that are going to allow you to browse by artist/genre/decade/content type; this is why it's important that you retain as much information in the tags as possible.

All I want from a folder perspective, is to break it down firstly by content type, then by processing type e.g. with commercial CD's it's possible to verify them, scrape metadata from online sources for them, and have them share a minimum set of metadata requirements (useful for running quality checking) e.g. label, barcode e.t.c.

So it may be that you'd have something like:

Code:

Music > Commencial > CD
                   > Download
        DJ Mixes (assuming these aren't commercial CDs)
        Other
Radio Shows
Podcasts
...

Within those directories, I'd tend to have something like (this is what I have, but then I only have commecial non-classical CDs):

%ALBUMARTISTSORT%/albumartistsort.jpg
%ALBUMARTISTSORT%/%DATE% - %ALBUM%/%DISCNUMBER%.%TRACKNUMBER%.flac
%ALBUMARTISTSORT%/%DATE% - %ALBUM%/folder.jpg
%ALBUMARTISTSORT%/%DATE% - %ALBUM%/%DISCNUMBER%.cue - needed if the pressing doesn't verify against AR/CTDB without it (PREGAP/DATA)

My tagging standards are:

Code:

DESCRIPTION               MANDATORY    
Album Cover               Y    
Album Artist              Y    
Album Artist Sort         Y    
Boxset Title              N    
Album                     Y    
Release                   N    Deluxe Edition/50th Anniversary Edition
Album Type                Y    Studio/BestOf/Compilation/Live etc
Genre                     Y    
Disc Number               Y    
Disc Subtitle             N    
Content Group             N    
Track Number              Y    
Artist                    Y    
Artist Sort               Y    
Track Title               Y    
Track Subtitle            N
Track Type                N    Hidden/Bonus
Original Artist           N    
Release Date              Y    
Original Release Date     Y    
Remastered Date           N    
Replaygain Track Gain     Y    
Replaygain Track Peak     Y    
Label                     N    
Catalogue Number          N    
Barcode                   N    
Date Added                Y

The important thing would be to take a sample of each, have a play and see what works, ensuring that you retain as much metadata as possible so it's easy to change your mind in future :-)