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Why use MP3 tags anyway? I don't understand, they're so burdensome to manage. I just do:

./Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3

It'll work with any music player and you can organize it even on a toaster, as long as it has coreutils. I use plain old mplayer to listen to music, just cd into the directory I want and call a script I made which is basically a glorified `find | xargs mplayer` (actually outputs the filenames to a playlist and makes mplayer read from it in slave mode so I can control it with keyboard shortcuts - from other workspaces, etc).

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And by that you lose quite a lot of flexibility. How do you listen to all the classical music that was composed in the 19th century, and was added during the last month to your library? With foobar2000 (or other players) this can be done in a matter of seconds, and you can create an auto playlist based on those criteria which updates automatically when you add new songs or songs no longer match.

Well if you need that then use mp3 tags. I never had that need.

Because a database is more powerful than a bunch of strings (I treat the tags in the file as the canonical representation; foobar2000 is happy to build an index from that info.).

For instance, add listening to tracks where an artist is featured to your system and you start having to account for it each time you bust out your coreutils. Move it into a tag and you only have to account for it when it is of interest.

Can you filter by genre? I know that you could do something like ./Genre/Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3 but there is possibly other elements that are useful in mp3 tags... and what if one song could be classified in multiple genres? would you keep multiple copies?

symlinks.

Many song titles have characters which are not legal in a filename, and this varies by OS.

While I agree with the rest of the features missing (folders vs. tags, basically), can you name these characters for me?

I would expect that most operating systems can accept most characters. Right, path separators are out, there are binary characters that aren't allowed (but then again - you have a hard time printing those on your CD booklet), so I'm genuinely curious where this falls short.

The problem isn't the quantity of characters disallowed, it's that they cover some reasonably common characters in tags. From the list of restricted characters on NTFS:

  \ / : * ? " < > |

There are a lot of artists, albums, and songs that use the forward slash (AC/DC, Less Than Jake's TV/EP), colon (Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution's "Intro: This is a Call to Arms"), asterisk (some releases of Serj Tankian's "Beethoven's Cunt"), question mark (Arctic Monkeys' "What If You Were Right the First Time?", David Bowie's "Life on Mars?"), and double quotation mark (David Bowie's "Heroes", Fall Out Boy's ""Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today""). As a stickler for having a well-organized music library, not being able to use those characters in my organization would be a bit grating.

Then you can't find symphonies by different composers, performed by different orchestras, but with the same conductor.

Unfortunately, this is also close to impossible in online music services, in my experience.

Sure you can , find | grep.

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