[tripzilch]

> Your proposal to store track info in with verbose naming isn't very robust and doesn't solve even the most basic problems that a simple metadata scheme does.

But that's how anyone who is serious about collecting digital music has been ordering it since ages. Sure, I never considered putting track length in the filename as :) (but I can see why), and if I can help it I have them tagged correctly too. But the file/folder structure is how I keep it organised.

There may be better ways to go about this, but it at least needs to be an actual improvement. iTunes is not.

Currently I'm experimenting with a command line tool called 'beets', which from reading its docs, definitely has a philosophy that aligns with mine. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out how to tell it where to get the metadata from, it defaults to MusicBrainz which seems to have quite a few inaccuracies in their data (spelling of "Kung-Fu", hyphenated or with spaces I don't care really but if you use both spellings on the same album, one of them is wrong). It's got plugins for discogs and figure-out-from-pathname so that's good, but then it still uses MusicBrainz too. All in all it's a bit fiddly, but I can't really imagine a way to do it better, if you want have accuracy, keep control, some assistance with automatic tagging, but without messing up weird edge-cases like the classical albums and bootleg recordings mentioned above (for which 'beets' tries real hard to do the right thing, that being what you decide it to be).