This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."
An album like 2.0 by Big Data would create 10 different distinct "artists" in most music players:
Big Data and White Sea
Big Data and Joywave
Big Data and Jamie Lidell
Big Data and Kimbra
Big Data and Rivers Cuomo
Big Data
Big Data and Jenn Wasner
Big Data and Dragonette
Big Data and Bear Hands
Big Data and Twin Shadow
Even Amazon Music had this problem up until 2018 or so, when my library collapsed from nearly 2000 "artists" to ~300 actual.
Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.
Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.
Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.
I know what hard links are.
> I get why that can’t scale to the general public
So why suggest it as a solution?
> pre-iTunes
So even you gave up on it?
You can organise your collection how you like. There is no right answer (although its obviously by genre).
If you're indecisive then just dump everything into one huge flat file, or just add links.
(That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.)
My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
The answer is probably in the realm of “That’s how we wrote desktop apps back then.”
Files are not real things. Just identifiers for an organization of bits that sound like a Neil Young sing when played through the correct decoder.
Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus
But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker?
In iTunes it’s irrelevant, because I can find the album by looking for Composer=Bach, Composer=Beethoven, artist=Wilhelm Furtwaengler, or artist=Wiener Philharmoniker. With a filesystem I would… use symlinks or something?
And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.
