How do you organize your downloaded music library?

Artist Name
    19XX - Album Name
        01 - Song Name
        02 - Song Name
        03 - Song Name
    20XX - Album Name
        01 - Song Name
        02 - Song Name
        03 - Song Name

I use Kid3 on mac to organize the ID3 tags. Back when windows was my main OS, I used AIMPTools for the task, it was one of my favorite software ever to use.

Music on my MP3 player is correctly tagged and named.

Music on hard drives is split into 3 groups. 1) Correctly tagged and named, and nicely organised into directories. 2) Correctly named but poorly tagged, or poorly named but correctly tagged, and nicely organised into directories 3) a big mess of stuff that is poorly named, or poorly tagged, or both, and scattered across a few different directories.

My directory structure is fairly simple: name of band, name of album, files. Some directories are just name of band and then a list of files.

I don't have a huge collection, it's only 80 GB or so.

I found MusicBrainz Picard to be really useful to tag files.

/Music/Artist, The/Album/Song.flac

For me,

Artist/Year Album/Track Title

If it’s Various Artists, then I have the artist in brackets after the title.

The Year is the original release year.

edit: for those using foobar, this is my DUI album list

$swapprefix(%<album artist>%)|%date% %album%|[[%discnumber% ]%tracknumber% ][%track artist% - ]%title%

The only difference between this and file view is that file view doesn't have the prefix swapped. Otherwise, everything is identical.

I listen to mostly soundtracks, so I organize it by album, and that's it. Each album gets its own folder, and singles go together in a different folder. That way, every time I download a new album, I make a folder, pop the files in there, and I'm done.

I would caution against putting everything in the same folder together. Duplicate filenames might be rare in practice, but the possibility would bug me. You might be better suited by software that can organize it for you. I can't name any off the top of my head, though (does anyone know if mp3tag can do that?)

Artist / Album / Track on foobar2000.

In terms of directory structure, everything is in two huge folders, Sorted Music and To Be Sorted. The sorted stuff mostly goes Broad music genre or category/Album artist - Album (Album year)/Track number. Track title to organize my full albums. I have a LOT of loosies, though, much of which was only released as singles or 7", or have different edits between the white label promo/single/album. I typically save those in the top-level genre folder by Artist - Track title (Relevant factor) and let tags take care of the rest of the details. My setup's a work-in-progress but this has worked well for me so far.

For all your tagging needs, I highly, highly recommend TagScanner if you're on Windows. It's lightweight, customizable, flexible, imports info from databases like Discogs/MusicBrainz/various Amazon domains, automates file management, and lots of other neat stuff. I think it even supports some light scripting.

Artist name - Album name in the Music folder. Then added into WinMedia Player with proper labeling/album art/etc since it's simple to edit things and I don't require much more.

Currently I don't have much (3 artists!) because most is on the streaming service I use, but certain bands only have their hifi files on Bandcamp so I use WinMP for those.

I don't organize them at all, I just put all albums in a folder as they comes (about 18'000 files). Then I import it in foobar and if I need to locate or modify files I use foobar to do it. I don't think baking a structure into the files hierarchy has much value, you better add tags and create playlists and stuff like that, it's more flexible and robust.

Music/Source or some other random folder name/Artist - Album (year) [MediaFormat] [cat#] [any other special notes the cat# doesn't fully solve]
Source is where I DL'd it from. Year is the original release year, since the cat# basically covers any type of re-issue or remaster. MediaFormat would be something like [WEB FLAC], [WEB MP3 V0], [Vinyl FLAC], [Tape FLAC]. Special notes are usually simple things [RE, RM, DLX ED, Bonus Tacks] but is rarely used.

There is no need to organize the folder structure because MediaMonkey alphabetizes the list and has options for sorting out specific things if needed. Also the program Everything lets me search my entire PC pretty quickly for files and folders if I am looking for something specific. I also use foobar2000 for transcoding to mp3 but haven't bothered to figure out how to fully customize it to my liking, where MM seems to do a fine job and looks good almost out of the box.