If you have a large diverse collection without ID3 tags you are pretty much fucked anyway. folders is extremely limited in sorting music which leaves you what? playlists?
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.
And about the single track folders, tick "part of a compilation" in info box will do the trick.
Keep listen to Pandora while it last.
If you listen to your music in a rigid way where folders works fine then obviously iTunes and other music management software are of no use to you. But you are not typical.
Is this really common? I might be out of touch, but I doubt anyone really uses this.
If you are into pop music, there are easy examples as well. Sometimes I need all the dance music, other times I only want dance music that are retro, or dance music from certain group etc. Folders will never be as flexible.
Any given Indian movie corresponds to an 'album' of songs. However, each song can in the album have a different set of artistes associated with it. Hell, sometimes there are multiple composers within the same movie's soundtrack. And Indian movie soundtracks are more tightly coupled than "Western" movie OST albums, so you can't just treat them as an independent collection of songs either. (Indians typically identify songs first with the movies they appeared in, rather than the composer or performer)
Basically, a majority of Indian movies are musicals - and a simple folder structure is just not enough to deal with such a collection of music!
1) All songs from the movie
2) All songs by the composer(s) (or 'music director')
3) All songs by the singer(s)
...with other edge cases like a specific combination of composer and singer, the decade of movie release, genre or even by the movie director.
ID3 tags and smart playlists are a frickin boon to managing a large set of Indian film music!
Yeah, nobody would want to use those. They especially wouldn't want to build a playlist on the fly with their ipod.
iOS devices all have to ability to create playlist on the fly to.
But building playlist without proper ID3 info can get tedious real quick and endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim.
The classics don't. It is the single feature that has me using a 3rd party firmware.
>endless playlist building is not a solution to the problem of quickly populating a queue on a whim
Of course it isn't, but browsing to a song/artist/album and being able to say "append to end of playlist" or "insert into queue next" are simple operations that are very friendly on a portable device, and once I had the ability to do so I couldn't go back.