Organising your music - how anal are you?

I agree with everything except your first rule: I always, ALWAYS do it "01 - Track title" with the "-" between the number and the track (and a space before and after the "-").
As for the rest, it is exactly as I do it. Special emphasis on the "All Words In Track Titles Must Start With A Capital Letter" rule.


Yes!

I'm a lazy OCDer. I'd probably do all of that if I could be arsed.... but I've got so much music in my library it would take an age to sort it all out to my own specifications.

Wow, you're anal. That'd take too much time for me, i don't have it i am afraid.

I only have this hierarchy on hard disk:

for instance:

g:music
|
|
TYLER BATES
|
|
The day the earth stood still

(folders and sub-folders that is)

And that's it, minimum metadata tags via winamp, just the composer and track title, sometimes. Then it's the recycle bin.

I have all my Tyler Bates scores archived in the recycle bin. It makes sense for so many reasons.

Owned, indeed.

Anal? you wanna talk anal?
Move aside and meet your master.

I have roughly 6500 albums that total about 120,000 tracks.
To NOT be organized would utterly destroy any hopes for any kind of insight in what I have. The human brain simply cannot deal efficiently with numbers like that without some kind of organization OR process (Thor's method would work fine as well, obviously).

Anyway.
There are several levels of breakdown in my collection.

The top level is Soundtracks and Non-Soundtracks (Soundtracks are BY FAR the major part of my collection).

Soundtracks are arranged alphabetically, a folder per letter (0-9, A, B, C, etc.)

The soundtracks proper are named
Sorted Film Title (original name, or game score indication if applicable) - Composer (Year)
The tracks are tagged by a set tag template I created in my tagging program:
CD no. if applicable - Track no. - Track Title (artist, if other than main composer)

The Non-Soundtracks are divided into these categories:
* Classical (self-explanatory, really. Medieval music to modern Morricone avant-garde)
* Folk & World (Ethnic music, and music based or or influenced by it, from Clannad to Adiemus to Balinese gamelan)
* Jazz (again self-explanatory, I guess. Tommy Dorsey to Miles Davis)
* Other (the nigh untaggables. Sound experiments. Cross-over material. Sound Effects. Seasonal music. The works)
* Popular (Pop and rock mostly, but also some muzak material. Basically 1950s+)
* Spoken Word (Audio books, radio plays. Lectures...)

Interestingly (a phrase I use with great care and extremely loosely, given the Ultimate Anorak context) I have a different naming convention in the Non-Soundtrack section: these albums are grouped by composer or artist, rather than by title.

The reason for this is historical, really: I tended to buy soundtracks to re-hear the film rather than a specific composer.
For every other genre I always tracked down a specific artist or composer.
Of course things changed over time, but the system is stuck in my brain. It's simply the most intuitive for me.

The only category to harbour other sublevels is Spoken Word, which has a rough classification of genres (Action, Drama, Historic, Comedy, Factual, et cetera). Simply because otherwise I'd have very little idea what I'd be going to listen to.

Any audo drama with "Star Wars" or "Batman" in the title of course gives a pretty good indication of what to expect, but a play called "Ghosts" turning out to be a psychological drama, or "Black Velvet" turning out to be a horror drama are rather more unexpected...especially as I don't actually tag them differently: To keep the genres as clear as possible all of these are still tagged as Spoken Word. So I only know the type from the folder they reside in. I have been thinking about this, but short of adding a shitload more tags (Which I really don't want to do), I don't know how to implement this more efficiently.

What?
And be locked up?

Good man.