Mine is a different situation though. I use mp3s to dj with now (using
Serato).
The real key for me is physical organization on disk, and smart playlists. I have everything organized by genre folders on disk, and then individual albums under the genres. I don't like to many layers of directories either. I like that I can open up my "disco/80s" folder and just browse EVERYTHING in that genre, even multiple records of the same artist (vs having an Artist folder level).
There are other interesting hints I could give, but they are mostly only serato/djing oriented type things.
But for regular listening, I have a 60gig ipod. I find that simple playlists with individual songs work best for my ipod, rather than loading whole albums. It is very difficult for me to browse anything but playlists on the iPod (only shows name of album OR name of artist, not both).
Lastly, you REALLY should backup your whole collection. Trust me. Just buy a big external drive, and get a good backup prog to mirror you whole thing. Nothing is worse than losing all you music due to a crash.
To that end, does anyone have any suggestions for backing up a 500gig drive to two 250gig drives? They are external usb 250's so I can't do that trick where windows thinks they are one drive. And my backup prog won't allow 2 target destinations. Perhaps there is one that does?
-pj