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[JimH]

Now that Media Center 9 has been released, we would appreciate your critique of how successfully Media Center handles your needs for a complete media tool.

For example, is image management good enough that you now use it routinely?  Or do you use another tool for this?  If so, why?

Same for Video, TV, or DVD.

(To those of you who prefer a music only product, please start a new thread if you'd like to discuss that.)

[clout]

I have a collection of aprox 8,000 music video files in mpg format. These are on a 400gig Lacie firewire hard drive connected to a Compaq Amada laptop computer.

I currently run MediaCenter9, 2 instances of WinAmp 2.91, 2 instances of the NiceMC video plugin for Winamp setup to run full screen on a 2nd monitor, and an automatic crossfader between the two Winamps. The output of the 2nd monitor is fed to a Mitsubishi data projector for rear projection onto a 10metre screen.

(Sorry to mention Winamp in the same breath as Mediacenter, but it's the only program I've found that works for me)

This setup is used to run a complete video disco with the playlist being made on the fly to cater for the crowds requests.

I use MC9 for quick lookup of clips by title, artist, BPM or year, then drag and drop into either Winamp 1 or 2's playlist. The crossfader starts playing the next loaded clip in the opposite Winamp 8 seconds from the end, fading the volume to full over 4 seconds, then fading out the original video. That winamp then loads the next video and stops waiting for the crossfader to start again at the end of the currently playing clip.

Whilst this setup works flawlessly for me it is rather awkward and cumbersome.Moving entries around in each Winamp is ok but when you decide that a particular song in Winamp1 would better placed in winamp2, it is a pain as winamp doesn't support drag and drop between two instances.

I also have some preset playlists setup in MC9 for things like say 20 minutes of R&B or a set of 70's disco, but because every 2nd song has to be played on the opposite Winamp I still have to drag and drop individual entris to each player.

At present I am basically using MC only for it's library and playlist functions. It is by far the best of any program I have seen. If I was using mainly audio files it would be all I would need as the crossfading works great for mp3's.

I would love to dump my winamps and plugins and just use MediaCenter, and this could be done if you could come up with some way of crossfading the audio of mpg files like you do with mp3s and a few changes to the way MC handles full screen display.

Sorry for the long post just to say I'd love to see crossfading of Video files. I have other ideas but I'll leave those for another post.

[Jaguu]

Hi JimH,

I am really satisfied with MC9 and use it as my only tool for music, images and video. Although I try out other tools from time to time to get some new ideas, I use only MC9 for one simple reason: I have invested a lot of time in importing, tagging, organizing all those different media, so once you have done it you stay with it. MC9 is a rather complex app and it takes a lot of time to learn all the features - you do not want to change all the time.

As there is always room for improvement these are some of the areas I would like to have improved and perfected:

1) MC9 should display menus, functions, properties consistently depending on media type. Just a few samples:
a) It does not make any sense to add cover art to images - so R/clicking properties should not display
cover art menu if media type is images.
b) same for things such as bitrate, duration etc. for images.
The whole of MC9 should always check whether it deals with music, images, videos, tv.

2) Flexible grouping of database fields. I would like to group database fields according to
a)  media type
b)  my own taste
and not to the groups given now by MC9. Samples: With images I have a family pictures view and also art gallery view with totally different fields and needs. With music I have classical music and other music which need totally different fields grouped the way I want them.

The best way according to me would be to extend the "View Schemes" feature, so that when I create a new view scheme I could define
a) the fields I want to have for this view
b) how fields should be grouped together
c) which groups and fields should be displayed in properties
d) how all of it should be sorted.
If I a want to deal with artworks (images) only, I do not want to be bothered in properties with database fields that belong to the music world.
There are probably more items that could be defined with such a specific view, things like
a) how data of this view should be backed up to cd's or dvd's
b) smartlists specific to this view only
c) naming rules specific to this view only (I might want to name classical music files differently than
jazz music files).

Also: Definitions of views should go into database files, as a lot of work goes into creating them and they may get lost after MC9 deinstalls/reinstalls, something like views.jmd

3) As already suggested before, it would be great if TV/Radio would follow the same view schemes as music/images/video. So you could create a view with your favorite TV/Radio channels and all media types would be consistently presented the same way to the user!

4) Improvement in Zone Management such as capacity to have the same music over different zones.

5) Improvements in Hairstyle (take myHTPC as good TV interface).  I am definitely not yet happy with that part.
When displaying MC9/Hairstyle on TV it should be bound to the TV display and it should not drop back to Mega-Me. I want Mega-Me only on my PC and Hairstyle only on TV. This does not work consistently yet.
Also I would like Hairstyle to be more integrated with Party  Mode.  We should be able to decide which parts of MC9 should be displayed on TV.

6) Language dependency! German, French, Russian, Chinese of the MC9 interface

7) MC9 should follow Windows XP standards more closely. Three things are still far behind many of the major applications on the market:
a) Support for AutoPlay V2 feature in WXP
b) Proper support for multiple users on a single PC
c) Proper support for user specific options. Every user on a pc should be able to define his own user specific enviroment for himself such as locations, playback options etc. Sample: User A should have his own library which user B cannot access. And they could have a common library as well. This is important for family pc's.

8 ) A playback-only version to include on cd's together with content. Would like to distribute tagged images on a cd. When inserting the cd a MC9 viewer should pop up and display/play its content.

9) Extend MC9 to support standard Microsoft file types such as .doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf etc. Then we could easily use MC9 as Windows Explorer replacement!!! I have done it by adding Winword and Excel to the SendTo Menu. It works well, but integration could be tighter, just clicking on a .doc file in My Computer should open WinWord.

10) Control of simultaneous audio and image playback could be improved. Very often when playing music unwanted slide shows start running.

I think that's all for the moment. These are things that I would consider improvements towards perfection, as they do not represent really revolutionary new features!

[xen-uno]

Jim,

Remember my (and your) inability to play interActual DVD's through MC? I would think the format of the movie itself should be a constant (mpeg/2). Any ideas of what's up? Moot point if this has been corrected.

10^-27

[KingSparta]

>> is image management good enough
Not For An Image Manager

>> you now use it routinely?
Not As An Image Manager

>> do you use another tool for this?
Yes, CompuPic Pro (CPIC) Use Allmost Every Day.

>> If so, why?
More Options

>> Same for Video
MC9 \ MS Media Player (What Ever Works)

>> Same for TV
ATI TV

MC9 Neg Points

1. When The TV Is Playing and you want to Quicly turn on the Recorder There Is No Record Button To Just Push

2. I Can Not Record And Play The TV At The Same Time. You Can In ATI's TV Program. And Since I Have ATI's Top Of The Line Video Card It Is Not That.

>> Same for DVD
WinDVD 4

MC9 Neg Points

1. Using The Slider Bar To Advance A DVD Does Not Work, And Snaps Back To The Current Place In The DVD Viewing.

2. Increase Playback Speed? If It has One I Have Not Found It.

=====================================

Plus Points You Can't Beat MC9 For A Music Jukebox

[nila]

Regarding audio - see the other post that is going on concurrently.


I agree with all Jagu's posts about being able to control the grouping and to set the properties window to only display specific fields in certain views - this is a BIG pain for me right now and hopefully will be fixed in v9.1

Again, I agree with right click menu's looking more at what type of file is being clicked on and giving menu's more appropriate to that type of file.

• Hairstyle:
  I dont want to see thumbnails personally on the right hand side all the time, I want to see a big text list that I can control which fields display (just like I can control views inside of MC). I'd like it to also display summaries too so like if I click on an artist and I have the view scheme set up as: artist/album, on the right it would display: a list that just shows me the album names not all the tracks along with the following info:
  - number of tracks in the album
  - total duration of the album
  - year of the album
  - genre of the album
  - etc.
  I could then go into any of those albums displayed and it would then show me all the tracks for that album.
  Basically I'd like to see summaries of the tracks and the tracks grouped as an extra level that I could then go into.
  The grouping tabs added to AV2 work incredibly for me and were such an amazing feature to have added.
  
  
  
• For Audio MC is kind of a jack of all trades, king of none right now. See my post in the other thread about specifics that could do with strengthening.
  
  
  
• For images I haven't started using MC and I dont think I am going to. I have two types of images on my computer:
  - images I dont particularly want to catalogue
  - photo's from hollidays that I'd like to catalogue
  
  For the first type I use ACDSee as it's specifically designed for images and so it's tools are image orientated and it has a lot of them.
  
  the second type are the ones I'd use MC for if I was going to use a program.
  I've considered using it before but the way it currently works for tagging I just dont like.
  
  
  
• If I was going to tag my images I'd want to be able to do this:
  see a list of say all the people that I currently have entered under a group of 'people' and be able to simply check the appropritate boxes to specify which people are in the picture. No typing or trying to remember what names I'd used previously, just be able to see instantly what names are there and put the picture into the appropriate categories.
  If the person wasn't in the list I'd want to be able to click on a button, add their name to the list of people available and then just check the box.
  
  It'd work something like how the 'playlists' box works right now where I could just check a box to tag the image.
  As a work around I could create playlists to manage my images and use the playlist tool to manage them instead but I'd then have to tag them after I sorted them and it's too much of a work around type solution.
  
  It would need to save all the people's names as a list type so that I could create view schemes that included the image in multiple locations.
  
  Also, MC doesn't read in the EXIF data so it cant automatically fill in data from the pictures taken from my digital camera. I could use imported date as a work around but again the date management tools inside of MC are non existant/lacking.
  
  
  
• I've started using MC to manage my video collection though and it works great. Haven't fully tested the playback on all my films but so far it works great.
  My Biggest problem is that I already have a mySQL db full of all the info from my films and I cant get it into MC unless I re-enter it all by hand which I'm simply not going to do for 450 films with like 10 fields each.
  I'm using it for all my TV Series that I am collecting now and it works a treat.
  
  
  Alot of non-positive info here but all that said and done, I pretty much PURELY use MC to manage and playback my music for me. It works amazingly and does everything I need it to do on a daily basis. v9 is a HUGE step up from v8 and I love it. In terms of my audio jukebox it is definitely the one and only solution for me and having spent like 3 years looking at and trying other programs, MC beats them all hands down. It's also turning into my solution for my video's too.
  
  
• Only real thing I'd LOVE to have to really give it the full power I need would be if I could query MC's web remote like I query mySQL and basically insert and extract info from MC in my php pages to integrate into my website
  
  
  Sorry this is so long

[sraymond]

Images:  MC doesn't provide much functionality.  I've mentioned before that being able to fill MC tags from the EXIF data would be a great help.  Until then, MC is nice to display a slideshow, but limited as a DBMS.  I still haven't settled on *ONE* photo manager...  I was kind of hoping MC would mature a little faster in this area!

Video:  MC is getting close, but there are some important features missing.  I started a thread that listed about 15 of them, so I won't repeat them here.  I still use MC for a majority of video, but I fall back on Zoom and Nplayer more often than I'd like.

TV:  MC is my preferred TV tuner - especially since the ATI application died on me and no amount of uninstall/reinstall helps.

Hairstyle:  Too slow and kludgy to use on an everyday basis.  This keeps me from using MC for the rest of the family.  I'd strongly encourage some short-term effort in making MC's Hairstyle at least as good as myHTPC.  I'm half-way done with building an HTPC and I'm leaning towards myHTPC vice MC.

Music:  There is no one that comes close to MC in this department!

Internet:  I've mentioned many times that I think of interent content as just another category of multi-media.  It would seem quite simple to repackage the already included webbrowser in MC to be more stand alone - letting http take its rightful place among the multimedia members.

Remote Control:  I find some missing MCC_COMMANDs a hassle - and without the girder plugin, I haven't had luck with sending keyboard events.  But the commands that are present work great!

Overall, I'm pleased with MC but a little frustrated that the small things haven't come along a little quicker (added MCC_COMMANDs for instance).

Scott-

[clout]

Nila said:

My Biggest problem is that I already have a mySQL db full of all the info from my films and I cant get it into MC unless I re-enter it all by hand which I'm simply not going to do for 450 films with like 10 fields each.
I'm using it for all my TV Series that I am collecting now and it works a treat.

I Had a similar problem with info for 8,000 video clips stored in an Access database.
What I did was :

1. export a query of all the fields I wanted in hyphen delimited format eg. Artist - Name - Duration - BPM - Genre1 - Genre2 - Year - Chart Pos - Comments.MPG

2. Then I used a very useful mass rename program called "FileRenamer" to rename all my files to this format

3. Import them all into MC.

4. Use Library Tools/Fill properties from Filename.

5. Use Library Tools/Rename files from properties to rename the files to something less cumbersome. I used "Name - Artist.mpg"

Apart from the enormous time it took MC to import the files the rest of the process took only minutes.

Hope this helps

[Doof]

Audio : Works great. Playlists could be a little easier to create. It would be nice to see the playlist and the media library at the same time, for instance.

Video : Needs work. FF and REW with MC via remote is just plain painful. 5 sec. skip should be replace (or enhanced) by a DVD player\Tivo like method. Other than that, it's fine.

Other than that, I can't comment. I don't use MC to watch TV or DVD's yet, so I don't know how well it works in this area. I would have to say that until MC supports some sort of Program Guide or xmltv format, I will NOT give up my TiVo.

Images : MC9 is not an image editor. It's just a photo album. As such, it's passable. I'm not big into digital photos yet, but I can tell that the thumbnail selection bug is going to make my job of cataloging a lot more difficult. I understand it's not your bug, but the fact remains.

All in all, though... MC fulfills my needs. There are some more advanced things I'd like to see (like CUE sheet\APL creation) in the audio side of things, but using EAC occasionally isn't so bad.

[Michael Horton]

As an audio tool, MJ is in a class by itself. Even the second best programs (what--maybe Helium2 and . . . sorry, but I can't even think of anything to compare MJ with as it's just that good.) pale in comparison.

As an image tool, MJ isn't yet in the same league as ACDSee or my favorite, ThumbsPlus. Why? Cerious Software is the JRiver of Image Software, and it would take quite a while to cite the differences. http://www.cerious.com/thumbsplus.shtml  is a good place to start.

I don't use any vidio programs or use the video features in MJ, so I don't have an opinion on that.

[JimH]

As an image tool, MJ isn't yet in the same league as ACDSee or my favorite, ThumbsPlus. Why? Cerious Software is the JRiver of Image Software, and it would take quite a while to cite the differences.

Hi Michael,
Can you name a couple of the big differences?  Or is it a lot of little things?

Anyone else who has a favorite for a task MC does -- please give an example or two of what you like in the other program.

Thanks.

[phelt]

Images: ACDSee
I like for the interface to change between viewing and browsing. Looking at an image, the interface is pretty stripped-down. I leave the status bar on for basic file info, and  few buttons at the top - next, previous, edit, rotate. I just press Enter and I'm in thumbnail mode. Easy, focused, fast. It also handles all the file formats that I need, which is quite a few. IrfanView is a good viewer as well, for the same reason.

Video and DVD: ZoomPlayer 3
Again, an interface that fits the purpose. The default skin is fine for me. Browsing and cataloging features are pretty weak, but I don't have enough to really need to catalog. I sometimes use PowerDVD, but its interface is weak and annoying IMO.

[rocketsauce]

DVD: Haven't tried it. I don't use my computer to play DVDs since it's right next to the TV and DVD player.

Video: As it stands now, I've got maybe 20 or 30 video files on my system, so they don't really need to be organized. If I did have a large collection of clips/music videos/movies, I probably would use MC because I think I would tend to organize them in the same ways that I organize my music. Again, though, I don't really use my computer to watch videos/movies.

TV: My video card only has TV out and my TV is about 10 years old, so I haven't tried to connect the computer to the TV. At this point in time I don't really have a need/desire to be able to see my monitor on my TV screen, but it's conceivable that could change in the future.

Image: Played around with MCs image management a little, but probably not enough to really evaluate it well. My impression was that I had a hard time taking tools that are geared primarily towards music organization and applying them logically to images. However, I do use MC to organize my cover art. Also, since I use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for image editing, I would probably gravitate towards something like Photoshop Album, since it would integrate better with the editing programs.

Ultimately, at this point in time, if given a choice between MC (music only version) and MC (multimedia version), I would choose music only.

Rob

[gkerber]

So far....

MC locks up and must be killed when trying to scan for tv channels for my Hauppauge card, which works perfectly using the Hauppauge software.

MC locks up when importing all my thousands of photographs and must be killed, so I'll keep using ThumbsPlus.

MC will not play MOV files, and will not import MPG files.  I guess I need to continue to use other players.

So I guess MC is a darn good music product for me.  And not useful at all for pictures, tv and video.

[Valisystem]

I've been using a new program, Adobe Photoshop Album, for the past few weeks to organize family photos. It has set the bar very high. In addition to thumbnail views, it does three things very naturally:

(1) it sorts photos from all locations into chronological order, based on EXIF tags if present, and allows you to click on a time line to locate photos by date.

(2) it has an intuitive set of tools for tagging photos in very flexible ways, and displaying a subset of images. Click boxes for "mom" and "christmas" and bang! there they are. Theoretically MC can do similar things but APA's tagging tools are very, very easy to use.

(3) it has builtin facilities to limited editing and fixing, plus a pretty good ability to create projects, e-mail photos, and the like. I didn't expect that to be important, but in fact I'm using those built-in functions frequently.

Sorry to sound like an advertisement, but I'm pretty impressed. I can easily imagine using MC as an alternative to Thumbs Plus or ACDSee for simple thumbnail work, but that may not be enough any more.

FWIW, PC Mag just did an article about the next generation of image managers: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,887373,00.asp

[rocketsauce]

MC will not play MOV files, and will not import MPG files.

I'm having no trouble playing .mov files here. You do have Quicktime installed (or at least QT codecs)?

I did have trouble importing 1 .mpg file. It would cause MC to freeze and I'd have to shut it down with CTRL+ALT+DEL. Once I took it out of the directory, all the other .mpg files imported and played just fine.

Rob

Listening to: 'Too Far Down' from 'Never Let Me Go' by 'Luther Vandross' on Media Center 9.0



Media Center Registered 9.0.172 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center\

Microsoft Windows 98 SE
Intel Pentium III 731 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 261 MB, Free - 130 MB
Resource Info: System - 60 %, GDI - 75 %, User - 60 %

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2800.1106 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.81 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2800.1106
Shell32.dll: 4.72.3812.600
wnaspi32.dll: 4.60 (1021) , ASPI for Win32 (95/NT) DLL, Copyright © 1989-1999 Adaptec, Inc. / Aspi32.sys: N/A

Ripping /   Drive E:   Copy mode:ModeSecure   CD Type:Auto   Read speed:Max
 Drive F:   Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer   CD Type:Auto   Read speed:Max
 Digital playback: Yes /  Use YADB: Yes /  Get cover art: No /  Calc replay gain: No /  Copy volume: 32767
 Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No  

Burning /  Drive E: PLEXTOR  CD-R   PX-W1210A   Addr: 0:0:0  Speed:12  MaxSpeed:12  Use MJ Engine:Yes
 Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: Yes /  Write CD-Text: Yes
 Use playback settings: No /  Normalization: None

[Cmagic]

Bonjour Jim,

My 2 centimes on the subject.

MC for MUSIC : Simple: it has replaced all the other software I was using, MC's the best for me.

MC for VIDEO : I use it for my (limited) collection of AVI files (mainly musical videos) and it's fine for me. The recent addition of frame capture to set thumbnails really helps a lot.

MC for PHOTOS: For several reasons already mentioned here that's the weakest point of MC. In no specific order here's what I find annoying with MC for photos :
- Interface was build for Music first, it is not adapted for photos. I've tried to delete fields like bitrate, duration, etc.. in a customized photo library without success.
- Date and time has to be given special attention for photos as it is one of the main library entry. In particular it should be flexible enough so that the user can select year, month, day, hour, etc.. to tag, organize or rename files.
- A better EXIF support is a requirement. Also a maybe limited IPTC support would be welcomed as it is the tagging standard for photos (used by Imatch, Photoshop, etc...)
- A larger file format support (Cannon RAW, Nikon NEF) would also be nice.
- The Camera support is also a bit weak. It should be able to directly support at least cameras from the major manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji...) through standard drivers. Also a file renaming while downloading feature would be nice (Check Breezesys download)
- Simple creativity Tools for photos are missing such as Printing, Contact Sheet, Web Pages creation, etc...

Jim, maybe we could start a thread in the www.dpreview.com forums (PC Tools) and offer the folks there to evaluate MC as a Photo Album software. You'd certainly get some useful comments from the Digital Imaging enthusiast crowd.

Christian

[JimH]

Jim, maybe we could start a thread in the www.dpreview.com forums (PC Tools) and offer the folks there to evaluate MC as a Photo Album software. You'd certainly get some useful comments from the Digital Imaging enthusiast crowd.

Hi Christian,
That would be very welcome if you're willing to do it.  It's much more credible if it doesn't come from us.

Thanks for the other specifics.  That helps.

I appreciate the comments of everyone who's participated so far.  It will give us a good road map for the next version.

[Cmagic]

Hi,

That would be very welcome if you're willing to do it.  It's much more credible if it doesn't come from us.

I can understand that Jim, I've read the recent thread about MC on Hydrogen Audio

I'll drop a post on dpreview then.

C.

[JimH]

bump

[Tolga]

Hi Michael,
Can you name a couple of the big differences?  Or is it a lot of little things?

Anyone else who has a favorite for a task MC does -- please give an example or two of what you like in the other program.

Thanks.

I like folder navigation in ACDSEE. MC is very good when the the files are already physically organized, but it is not as good as ACDSEE to organize them physically.

My Computer in MC is a very good first step. Its role may be not very appearent to the beginners; after all there is already the windows explorer outside. It is a very important component to be able to physically organize (directories) and logically organize (tags) files at the same time, so that the database is updated as the physical locations change. This is very important to keep the playlists updated during location changes. External explorer cannot replace this.

Having said that, MC explorer is not as strong as Microsoft explorer or ACDSEE. The absense of Folder view on the right handside makes the whole difference. It is the physical organization scheme everyone is used to. I bet tagging would be much easier, if there were such a view in MC.

Another useful feature of ACDSEE is the creation of html albums. MC 10 should have some feature to pack&go; to create music/image cds that you can give parents as present.

[escaflo]

I just bought MC today after using for a few days. I have to say I am very please with MC.

Ok, I use MC to play mainly most of the media files that I have such as mpg, avi, and of course mp3s.

but there are a couple of issues with mc that  prevents me from using it to play DVDs and also VCDs with it

First of all, MC cannot play VCDs at all. Secondly, MC does not support dolby digital 5.1 when playing back dvds. I manage to find a work around for this by installing NVDvD but since I already install it, I might as well use NVDvD to play it. Also, i got a couple of mpg files that are actually vcds karaoke files. in windows media player, it is possible for me to choose the left and right audio channel and as such i can choose whether i want to hear just the music of the video or both the vocal and music at the same time. i can't seem to be able to find this option in MC.

Apart from all that, I think MC handles my need quite well as a media tools.

[Cmagic]

Jim,

Just posted a message to announce the release of JRMC9. on dpreview / PC tools forum.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/

We will see what the photo enthusiasts think !

Christian

[Jaguu]

Tolga,

it is not really necessary to physically organize your files in a explorer type environment with MC9 - it is much easier than that, because MC9 will do it for you automatically. You do it in just 3 steps:

1) Import your files into MC9
2) Tag your files the way you want it. Of course this can be a major task depending on how complex your tagging needs are.
3) Once everything is neatly tagged, just use the Feature "Rename Files from Properties" and set the directory/file naming rules according to your taste.

You will receive a perfectly organized tree of your media files in the twinkling of an eye! Such is the power of MC9. MC9 is a powerful tagging tool. Physical organisation simply follows the tags!

Want an example: I had some 600 artwork files named as follows:

Artist, Title, Year, PaintStyle, Gallery, Country of Gallery.jpg

The file names were quite long, often exceeding 120 characters, so I wanted a better physical organisation.
I imported all 600 files and tagged the files as follows:
Artist
Title
Year
Paintstyle
Movement
Collection
Gallery
Country

That was the most time consuming part. Then I simply used "Rename File from Prpoerties" according to the following rules

Directory: [COLLECTION]\[ARTIST]
Filename: [ARTIST] ([YEAR]) [TITLE]

Needless to say, I got a perfectly organised directory tree in seconds.

[Tolga]

Jaguu,

you are right that there are already strong physical organization features. But there may be always things you may want to do manually.

For example, I physically put my files in directories not larger than 700MB, order album directories with numbers i.e.
01 - Queen - Greatest Hits, and put a lot of stuff in each directory, for example logs files of the ripping (EAC), or stf files to verify MP3 content has not changed (MP3 Book helper). Rename would not be able to deal with such external files.

Moreover, your suggestion implies physical organization should follow tagging. I change and fix tags all the time. A spelling error there, a missing info here.... I don't want my physical organization change if I change my tags. Because I want it to correspond exactly to my backup/portable player CDs.

Another problem is the tags/characters that are allowed in tags and path names. I don't want to have long paths because that may create problems with CDs, but I want long and informative tags.

Bottom line is: I want to be able to tag and physically organize at the same time.