I didn’t think OP meant physical.

My files are either in folders by album or, for singles, by alphabetical folders using the artist’s name.

No playlists needed.

How I keep my physical music files.

When I had albums the only one I cared about organizing was the one on the end that people could see. I always made sure it was something that showed how cool I was.

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years and let it do most of the work. Mostly I focus on my playlists, like “Current Mindlist,” “Calm the Fuck Down,” and “You’re Gonna Get a Speeding Ticket.” I also do smart lists by artist, genre, or grouping tags. It’s worked really well for my 50k+ files on the computer side. Just need to find a good player for my iPhone so I can pass ratings back and forth along with changes to playlists made on the phone. I used Spotify for a decade or so and have enjoyed digging back into my old stuff.

I have a quite large music library.

General music folder is organized by artist name, alphabetically.

Within each artist folder I organize albuns by year.

Each track is numbered in the file name itself.

Extra data goes into the file tag, readable by my music player.

Picard musicbrainz + jellyfin + feinshin + lidarr

Works a treat

this is a real problem. one of the next projects is to build a scaner that will leverage the Shazam API to identify and sort all my loose music (about 300% of my collection). afterwards I’ll be using said project to identify ripped physical media from my massive 33/45/78 collections, some of which are local presses from almost 100 years ago that nobody has heard in decades.

by preference of which albums and playlists go together, then within that… by alphabetical order.

Um, do you mean discs and albums? Because that’s physical media.

Anything else is bits.

I don’t. Every album goes in the ~/Music folder. I don’t use playlists unless you count albums as playlists.

I like my folders and separations. I separate the artists by the first letter of the name. I have 27 folders in my music folder. # and a-z. Then artist and album. So my music directories look like Music/R/Rob Zombie/Hellbilly Deluxe/Rob Zombie - Dragula.mp3. I know people who just drop everything into their music folder unorganized and let their player organize it. I can’t do it, personally. Holding the file requires proper placement for me.

I assume you mean digital files. I keep them all lumped together in a folder. I only have around 1,300 songs, since I only download the specific songs I’m looking for and not entire albums.

I organize my playlist by mood or use. “Working” is high bpm and general upbeat motivating things, “Singing” is things my middle aged ass sings along with when drunk or otherwise chemically enhanced, “Sadness” is the most soul crushingly painful songs that have lyrics I directly relate to, “Sexy time” is for when your mom or anyone else here’s mom visits… the usual.

Alphabetic by artist/band name and then chronological.