Once you've settled on a filing format, making any changes is difficult - it involves a lot of retrospective work.  Having said that, and recognising that such things are a matter of personal taste, your filing system did strike me as being a bit complicated!

I am pernickety about the way I file my music, especially the more than 8000 tracks sitting on my iPod, and the (slightly smaller) amount on my hard disk, which I file using iTunes.  The key is to impose your ID3 own filing system, stick to it religiously, and not to be seduced by the capital-letter strewn offerings of Gracenote (which is good for saving you a bit of typing, but not much else), and not to worry overly about what folders your tracks are stored in on the hard disc - get the ID3 tags right and it doesn't matter.

The format I use is to turn each work or group of works into an album, with the name of the composer as part of the title. The actual disc is irrelevant - so, say, two symphonies on a single disc would be two albums, an opera on three discs would be a single album. So, to take an example, I have an album entitled Mahler Symphony No 7, containing the tracks from the work with each one preceded by a two digit number (01, 02 etc - two digits needed as Windows thinks that 12 comes before 2), as follows;

01 Langsam (Adagio) - Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo
02 Nachtmusik: Allegro moderato
03 Scherzo. Schattenhaft - Trio
04 Nachtmusik: Andante amoroso
05 Rondo-Finale: Tempo I (Allegro ordinario)
06 Applause


This means that albums (and hence works) are alphabetically listed by composer, and I can find the album sorting by composer, album or genre (in this case Mahler symphonies) or by artist (in this case Berlin PO - Abbado).  I might also group works into large albums - for example I have all Klemperer's Beethoven Symphonies  in a single album, the tracks listed as:

Symphony No 1 In C Op 21 - 01 Adagio molto - allegro con brio
Symphony No 1 In C Op 21 - 02 Andante cantabile con moto
Symphony No 1 In C Op 21 - 03 Menuetto: allegro molto e vivace
Symphony No 1 In C Op 21 - 04 Finale: adagio - allegro molto e vivace
Symphony No 2 in D Op 36 - 01 Adagio molto - allegro con brio
Symphony No 2 in D Op 36 - 02 Larghetto
Symphony No 2 in D Op 36 - 03 Scherzo, trio: allegro
Symphony No 2 in D Op 36 - 04 Allegro molto
Symphony No 3 in E flat Op 55 - 01 Allegro con brio
Symphony No 3 in E flat Op 55 - 02 Marcia funebre: adagio assai
Symphony No 3 in E flat Op 55 - 03 Scherzo: allegro vivace
Symphony No 3 in E flat Op 55 - 04 Finale: allegro molto

And so on.  Again, I can find them by composer, album title, genre or artist.

This may sound pedantic, but I find it works.

The problem, of course, is that I developed this system early in the piece and to do it retrospectively would be an epic pain.  It is also dependent on playing around in iTunes if you want the tracks in the album to in a different order from the original discs.

Organising audio on the computers and elsewhere (lots of my recordings are not music) is a complete nightmare - I've got nowhere near a satisfactory solution.

Can you explain how you achieve that? I was attempting to rip a double CD the other day using Windows Media Player and couldn't work out how to combine it into a single album. Media Player automatically put each disc into a separate folder, and just copying from one folder to the other didn't do anything. Instead of showing 12 (CD1) + 6 (CD2) tracks, the album was listed in the Media Player library as containing only the 6 tracks from CD2. Renaming the files so the tracks ran from 01 - 18 instead of 01-12 and 01 - 06 didn't work either.

Hmm. I suspect that WMP isn't as fully-features as iTunes, but I think you've given me an idea of how I should have been doing it. I will fiddle a bit more tonight...