Well, I used folders and filenames for years, from 1998ish through June 2003. Worked fine; I mostly wanted to listen to entire albums, which mapped well to folders.
Then I got a Mac, and pointed iTunes at my music without backing it up first (because, after all iTunes was an MP3 player, and why would it write to my MP3 collection?!). Oops. Later I found that there was some import option I shouldn't have checked, and iTunes happily moved all my MP3s from their well-sorted folder structure into "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Unknown Title". Yay.
Even when I eventually got some software that would use a music database to figure out what tracks were, there were a distressing number of tracks that it couldn't identify (hundreds), and of the ones it could, it mostly did so in a very literal way, such that I have a lot of folders like "Movie Soundtrack - Artist Name" with a single track inside.
Could I fix all this? Of course. Eventually. Can you tell I'm still, eight years later, extremely angry at iTunes?
Then I got a Mac, and pointed iTunes at my music without backing it up first (because, after all iTunes was an MP3 player, and why would it write to my MP3 collection?!). Oops. Later I found that there was some import option I shouldn't have checked, and iTunes happily moved all my MP3s from their well-sorted folder structure into "Unknown Artist - Unknown Album - Unknown Title". Yay.
Even when I eventually got some software that would use a music database to figure out what tracks were, there were a distressing number of tracks that it couldn't identify (hundreds), and of the ones it could, it mostly did so in a very literal way, such that I have a lot of folders like "Movie Soundtrack - Artist Name" with a single track inside.
Could I fix all this? Of course. Eventually. Can you tell I'm still, eight years later, extremely angry at iTunes?
Now I just listen to Pandora. Screw it.