Hi Victor,
I suspect that your primary mistake may have been to confuse the process of naming the physical disk location of a music track with the metadata associated with that track. Any intelligent media database solution such as MC is organised using the metadata, not the physical disk location.
You also appear to be suffering from the curse of classical metadata, which is that most of the online databases add composer and work information to each track title. That way lies madness. No music players can cope properly with such long track names. It is also impossible to organise a classical music collection without the basic tag trio of
Composer,
Work and
Track but the online databases seldom, if ever, provide a Work tag. This means that you have to create your own custom tag for this purpose (easily done in MC).
I have found no option but to manually edit the publically available metadata every time I rip a classical CD, so that composer, work and track information is each contained in its
own tag, with no data duplication. After a bit of practice, this editing does not take all that long and is well worth the effort.
While the physical location of your music files is not of great importance, I think there is still considerable merit in storing these files in a coherent manner and naming the folders in such a way that you can track them back to the original album. However, there is no need to duplicate the potentially more complex metadata descriptions. For example, a folder name of 'Symphonie fantastique' would normally be more appropriate than a folder called:
Symphonie fantastique for orchestra ('Episode de la vie d'un Artiste...en cinq parties'), H.48 (Op. 14)
Shorter folder names are also much easier to read in Windows Explorer, etc. I hope this helps and is not repeating too much of what you already know.
David
EDIT: It's been a few months since I ripped any CDs and, on reflection, what I have done in practice is to aim for work titles that provide the happy medium of being adequately informative but not too long to use as a folder name. I use dBpoweramp CD Ripper, which does not support a Work tag, so I start by using the Comment field for this purpose and for automatic folder naming. My Work tag in MC is populated via a calculated field that looks at the value in the Comment tag. In the few cases where a long work title is unavoidable for metadata purposes, I go back later after the rip is complete to shorten the folder name.
Things are done slightly differently if I am ripping a classical album of single track works, e.g. Chopin Nocturnes, where there is no need for a work folder.
