[Shish2k]

Ditto - automatic organisation by metadata might be nice if metadata wasn't universally inconsistent and incomplete. I tried manually fixing my whole library and it was nice for a couple of weeks, but there's so much ongoing maintainence overhead that OS-level folders are the only thing I bother with any more :(

[signa11]

one possibility might be to let beets handle all the music organization while cmus just leverages that to provide different views on that data using beets.

just a separation of concerns really...

[anon4]

The metadata doesn't even reflect the way I think about music. And what do you do with movie OSTs, which are by ten different artists and some are songs from other albums? It's just madness.

[aidenn0]

I use beets for tagging, and it has no trouble with OSTs. It sets a different tag for Album artist and Track artist, and cmus uses the Album artist. Most soundtracks of the type you mention are under <Various Artists>.

I'm different from most people in that nearly all of my music collection is complete albums, so if that's not the case, then I could see how a file/folder layout would work better, and the artist/album view is more full-featured than the file-browser view.

[edit] Also as far as I can tell, there's no way to filter based off of path (only filename) which might also be a good way if you prefer directory based organization.