Okay, here's my attempt for the physical structure on disk, assuming no additional aids are present to help you conveniently browsing your albums.
First of all, lets see what you'd want to achieve :
This shows the albums in a comfortable size.
And what you do
not want to achieve :
This shows the behaviour of XP when more than one album is contained in a folder. Thus, here we created dedicated folders for the artists. One for De Le Sould, one for Deep Purple, one for Diana Krall, etc.
From a hierarchical point of view, and browsing fast through the artists which you probably want to choose first, and withing there the album, this looks nice. However, apart from the *not* comfortable size, there's only 4 albums to show. When you'd have more of an artist, they don't show ...
This is how Vista shows it (the albums are diffent) :
So clearly, this is even worse. Besides the very uncomfortable 3D look, now only 2 albums are shown ! So, there really are 10 Pink Floyd albums in there ...
Note : Vista
can show the albums in 2D look, and one per "folder" (as in the first picture above). This is achieved by using the Search function. However, firstly so far the Search function is unstable, awkward or just not understandable, *and* it requires rather deep settings (to rather properly show all, refresh all, etc.) which is just nothing for a normal human being. Secondly, the then shown folders can only be opened with rightclick and choosing "open location" from a context menu. Really a slowish thing.
Below picture shows how we achieved the first situation above :
So what you see here, is that all albumnames are qualified with the artist name. This is now needed because
- we don't use hierarchical folders for the artists (see above)
- we need the artistname really.
This disadvantage of this way of working may be the enormous "flat" browsing you'd have to do to find an album. There's no hierarchical means to tear things down. So all is "flat" indeed.
The advantage may be that by this means it is more easy to find your latest new albums; My own experience tells me that -if you'd have separate folders for the artists, you just do not have any means to bump into this new album. You'd have to dive into each artist folder to achieve that ...
And do remember : you will end up with well over 1000 albums at some stage ...
Here's what to do with multi volume albums :
As you can see, this means of working - having all the volumes in one folder -
requires each track to be prefixed with the volume "ID".
If you do not do so, you'd have a sequence of
01 - In The Flesh
01 - Hey You
02 - The Thin Ice
02 - Is There Anybody Out There
and you really wouldn't want that.
The disadvantage of this way of working is that this needs additional work at/after ripping; the "(CD1)" or what ever you want for that, does not go in there by automation. And I don't think any means exist to let the ripping program (e.g. EAC) automatically let prefix your tracks with something like this (*and* you'd have a prefix for all tracks, including the 1-volume albums). Maybe others know better ...
Here's s good alternative though (but note that "The Wall" should be "Pink Floyd - The Wall" according to the above) :
Here you see that each volume is contained in its own folder. Like with the previous example you could determine your own "(CD1)" qualifier, here you can determine the foldername yourself. Do note though, that in both cases the alphabetical sequence must match the physical volume sequence (well, that would be rather logical, right ?).
I must note that this way of working might not work for other players than XXHighEnd at showing the album cover. That is, the folder.jpg where the cover is stored in, will just not (or even should not) be at this "volume" level. It really should be at the album level. XXHighEnd will search upwards in the folder tree for it, so no problem with that.
This means of storing multiple volumes is really comfortable, because at ripping it's very easy to create the subfolders (especially if you name them "1" and "2" etc.), *and* you'd nicely have a volume together for its tracks. However, if you really like to play the complete album for its both volumes, this would be a kind of disadvantage. "Kind of" because, of course, it is very easy to drag both volumes in the playlist area (of XX anyway).
Here an example of something you could do wrong :
Here each track is qualified by the artist name. This is not *really* wrong of course, but it will prevent you more from reading the actual track name, mainly because of the physical space needed, and as you will know the name of classical albums may grow inconveniently long (shoving out the track name at the right side).
Of course this needs the artist name to be shown continuesly (at playing), but XXHighEnd does just that.
Now note that with this last example something else is wrong; Where we assumed the artist name to be shown in the track name, it could just as well be the album name. As we understand, it can't be both here, no matter whether the album would be named the same as the artist name (often occurring with a first album). So if you'd be doing something like this, you'd have to add *and* the artist name *and* the album name.
But there's really no reason to.
The most important reason to this being really "wrong", is that it would be redundant. This is a phenomenon which always gets on your tail some day, which would be about changing things; when things are redundant, you'd need to change it more than once, or at more than one place, etc.
If there's anyone with additions, or better ideas ? please say so !
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