[bgruber]

"Albums from oldest to youngest? No problem. Artists alphabetically? Sure thing. Artists alphabetically and their albums in chronological order? No problem."

from the "to each his own" file: i have never understood why anyone would care about sorting their music in any of these ways. To me, none of these are ways to "view my music that make sense for music." On the other hand, I find a directory structure for albums and everything else chucked into a giant directory to work just fine, as it supports the sort order I do sometimes care about, mtime. Normal search tools like locate work pretty well too.

In previous comments on related articles on HN, I have pointed out that files, and to a lesser extent directories, are good because they serve as a universal protocol-of-sorts for dealing w/ blobs of data. That allows you to use the system that works for you, and me to use the system that works for me, and yet we can still share files and move between systems etc. with little headache.

I am actually sympathetic to moving to a tag-like system that supports hierarchical tags (gmail style), so that multiple organizational structures can be imposed onto a mess of files. I also find it funny that that's more or less how unix file systems work under the hood.

[hsmyers]

All of these music filing schemes fail miserably when confronted by Classical music. There you often have four 'obvious' candidates for leading tag---composer, performer, conductor, title etc. There is even an entertaining amount of discussion on the net about the best way to solve the problem. The only point of commonality accepted is that the iTunes approach simply does not work. Then every one starts to bang their personal agenda drums; all sadly out of sync. And this for a subject that every one 'knows' Move into other areas and you will find similar problems. This does not even begin to touch the problem of tagging as a speed bump---takes time, ask a librarian :)

[aprendo]

How much music do you have? 100 songs?

I have 5,380 titles, I cannot for the life of me imagine how to deal with that inside the confines of the file system. I want to browse my music. (It probably doesn’t help that I despise search. Search is no alternative to browsing for me.)

(Besides: This is not some evil scheme. Metadata for music is completely standard. My music library app – and every popular music library app – puts music in straightforward human-readable folders. That’s a nice fallback if all else fails – but to me it is just that. A fallback.)

[jarek]

I have 3575 music files on my current main hard drive, organized by hand into an /Artist/Year - Album Title/File.ext structure just fine. I don't listen to classical music or by genres, though.

[antihero]

I have around 69,000 and I find that due to the fact that most music players choke on that amount, that often sorting by filename is one of the fastest ways to get my music into a decent order.

Also in response to other post - you can quickly rename your music with something like Musicbrainz Picard (cross platform) or foobar2000 (Windows).

[bgruber]

for the record, I too have about 5000 tracks these days.