How timely.. Something must be in the air in Upstate NY, as I spent the better part of yesterday and some of today organizing my MP3's and updating the tag information with Musicmatch 10.
BTW- Musicmatch's supertagging is the best that I've found. I select 100 at a time and it goes out and updates the tag info along with album cover. After they are tagged, I use Musicmatch to rename them all with the same format:
Artist, Title, Album.
My structure under the MP3 folder:
'69 and Earlier
70s
80s
Soundtracks
Blues-Jazz-Soul
Christmas
Classical or Instrumental
Country
Favorites
Mello (Wife's folder that I've put soft music into for her playlist)
New Music
Rap - Dance
Rock
I have 1,274 (of my over 10,000) songs in the root of the MP3 folder that don't necessarily fit into the above folders.
With all that said, the way I classify the songs primarily is with Winamp playlists. I keep the main playlists setup with folders, but many MP3s fit into different playlists, so it's a long manual process to classify the first time, and then I just add new music. Newly ripped music sits in the New music folder until it can be properly tagged, sorted and added to the appropriate playlists.
I am pondering a better solution, such as the rating system, but my playlists are excellent at the moment, with the only pain being adding and sorting the new music.