Going one step further than what 623... told you, one of the great things in JRiver is the ability to create expression fields that will copy information, but list it diferrently. Don't worry I'll get to your probleme further down
For example. I'll take an album from my collection Stan Meets Chet
I have two fields the normal Artist and Artists (notice the plural). Filing in the artist
s field from the tag window you can choose via a list which will automatically fill in the "artist" field. You could do that in reverse too by using the separator ";" between the two or more artists. like this ...
Stan Getz; Chet BakerSo in my example The Album artist is Stan Getz & Chet Baker; the artist field would be Stan Getz; Chet Baker. Without this you would either be creating a new artist field called Stan Getz & Chet Baker (ok for album artist but not when individually filtering by artist) or you could even get a Various Artist type album. Personally I use Albumartist, and not Albumartist (auto), but regardless, the only thing to note is in lists or views sorted normally by album artist then album and maybe date, in this example it would sort under S for Stan and not C for Chet.
If you are OCD like me, I also fill out the soloist field to include all the people playing on main albums (except maybe BIg Band records
).
So following that example, if you searched for any artist you would pull up his main albums, albums where he is featured, and albums where he plays but is credited as a sideman.
If you make sure that important fields (metadata) are written to the file (Files and folders => manage library fields), it will not only be on your backup outside of JRiver, but will also permit you to use a Library tool to copy that meta data form the files to the library (Update Library from Tags click write to file when possible). So all your hard work setting up your collection has multiple ways to restore itself.
The structure of the directories on HDs are IMO is secondary as you can always find the physical file using the locate external command. whether you decide to rip to Chet Baker or Stan Getz or Stan Getz & Chuck Baker is up to you. Consistency is good though
. Forget clicking on directories to play, but do as you like of course.
SO to get back to your issue at hand, and there are many ways to do this but I would first import everything to at least sort out any album album artist mess following along the lines of what 6233638 told you. Then I would rectify any tagging errors making sure that the critical tag fields write to the disk as explained above (probably better to remove what you have imported already of course).
Set-up autoimport correctly using mapped or UNC paths but simplified like 623 mention C:\Music\Thelonious Monk\<Album Name>\ or if you have to C:\Music\Jazz\Thelonious Monk\<Album Name>\ -- multiple disk could look like this C:\Music\Thelonious Monk\<Album Name>\cd2\
In auto import you can just set C:\Music\ even if you have things like this C:\Music\#2-Jazz + C:\Music\#1-Classical C:\Music\#3-Various Artists.
Now if you have really messed up your directories (or want to make them more coherent with ripping)? I'd suggest an external program =>
TagScanner which will allow you to make all sorts of changes and its free. If you do this you will have to reimport using autoimport again. This program will also make it easier to create your "Miles" Directory. This can also be done internally in JRiver by the file rename command but with 2000 cds that would be painful (ok for just miles, but ....). In the external program you can create a mask which I think would be more flexible. When adding music later you can use the Move Rename Copy command in JRiver and set up presets.
Please back up your library at each step and your music before starting just in case .... hope this helps