Somewhat niche, but in the electronic music genre (house, techno, trance etc.) albums and single tracks are a rare thing. People mostly listen and consume DJ livesets/-mixes, and using filenames & folders to organize is basically the way to go. It is very difficult to come up with any sane metadata system, let alone that all music players are unable to cope with that kind of music collection. Public metadata databases like Musicbrainz etc. are not a thing there, and sets are usually not commercially sold - so all metadata would also have to be manually entered.
In case anybody wonders about the (legal) sourcing, in most parts of Europe it is still perfectly legal to record radio stations, locally download from Youtube/Soundcloud etc. and even share/copy with close friends and family. And the market for livemixes is huge in the youtube era, see productions from Cercle, Boiler Room etc.
Well as said, you mostly will have to do the metadata assignments - and what is it good for, if DJ name + title are already in the filename? If you do exactly as you suggest, Apple Music i.e. would always show a single album for the same DJ, even if you have 50+ sets. Also way more important is the year of the set, often you want them ordered by date of recording.
> However if your music library is older than itunes and consists of lossless WAV/PCM files there is no metadata. There is only the filename.
So putting your music on an iPhone isn't impossible. It just means that you would have to take the time to add metadata to the existing files (and possibly first converting them to a lossless format that supports metadata--I'm guessing PCM does not).
That sounds like a situation iTunes/Apple Music is completely unfit for. I think foobar2000 was able to manage that kind of thing? You gotta see that it's a niche situation, not something that even most people who seriously care about their library do.
What happens when you drag one of those files into Music? It doesn’t use the filename as the track name? That’s my recollection of how iTunes used to work with naked music files, but I haven’t tried it with the Music app.
In case anybody wonders about the (legal) sourcing, in most parts of Europe it is still perfectly legal to record radio stations, locally download from Youtube/Soundcloud etc. and even share/copy with close friends and family. And the market for livemixes is huge in the youtube era, see productions from Cercle, Boiler Room etc.