I use WMP as well, as it's got several ways to catalogue them, either by track name, artist name, genre, but I usually just stick with the artist list as more often than not I'm looking for a certain song by a certain artist.

Several ways to catalogue them .. Which of the popular media players that handles media libraries don't do this? I haven't tried them all, but I guess different ways to access your music is something "they" would all think of.

It was fun to read this discussion, I discovered a lot of various options to solve the problem of organizing. I had it too and used to keep all my audio files in separate folders, but as the collection grew my directories were getting more and more messy. So I began to look for a software to handle this and iTunes was a solution. Lately I’ve found another program, Musicnizer, it looks very promising and does what I need. I’m testing it now. Helps pretty much

Foobar can organize files according to %tags% which is really handy :)

Personally, I don't organize them into any subfolders (singers, album, genre, etc.).
I just throw them in under 1 folder, all of them. whether they're songs from way past 70's or from a boy band or whether it is classic or modern or slow song or disco music. the reason is that when i play music, either on my pc or in my cellphone, i want to do a play shuffle. it's like not knowing what's the next song that's gonna play. unlike if you're gonna put them under 1 folder let's say per singer, all the time you know you're listening under one singer. so that's my answer, i never really organize my music folder. i just throw in whatever i have on a single one.

Any decent player worth it's bits will have a shuffle function that will play your files like that for you. That way, you can organize your files so that you know what's where and you can listen to your music shuffle-style.

I usually tag everything perfectly in my media player (iTunes, WMP, RP, etc.), but could care less about how the source file is tagged.

What do you mean? That you store each file's tag info (artist, album title, track title etc) in a program database file instead of writing it to the file?

That's a pretty silly thing to do because then you'd lose all your info going from one program to another unless there's a database import function.

I primarily use iTunes. I tag everything within the program as I don't plan on using the files in any other program. But your point is heeded, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

by album

then all the albums, under the act