What I’m going to say here is mostly how I do things. It is not the only True Way® to do things, nor I’m pretending it is, I just think it might be good reference for some people.

Also, all software I’ll mention is Linux software. I have no idea on Windows or Mac equivalents.

My strategy regarding music boils down to four steps: collect, standardise, share/access

1 - collect

From CDs/DVDs I had lying around, YouTube (discouraged; quality is often meh), torrents (often great quality, and full discographies!), whatever. Remember: if paying is not owning, piracy is not theft.

Useful software to do so:

• abcde - it’s command-line but it does it job: to rip off CDs
• transmission-gtk - a simple GUI-based torrent client
• Video Download Helper - Firefox extension, useful to download tracks from videos online, already in MP3.

2 - standardise

I like to convert everything into high quality MP3, because even a toaster runs MP3 files. Other formats you’ll find are

• FLAC - lossless, but takes huge amounts of space. I’m not going to pretend I can hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC.
• OGG Vorbis - I’d love to use it, if compatibility wasn’t tricky.
• BIN/CUE - urgh… those are a pain, because all tracks get lumped into the same pair of files.

After converting the files, I check their tags, and fix them as needed: artist, track name, album name etc. should be all present and consistent. Ah, if there’s no album art I download it from the internet and add it. It’s a lot of work but it pays off, the result is nicer and I get less headaches later on.

Useful software to do this:

• SoundKonverter - it converts sound. Wow. But it does a damn great job.
• easytag - to fix MP3 tags

3 - organise

Repeat with me: “don’t be smart, be predictable”. Follow whatever organisation scheme you feel comfortable with, but it needs to be consistent and make sense for you. Ah, resist the temptation to organise tracks by genre; I tried it and it gets messy really fast, human art laughs at your attempts to box it.

I work well with hierarchies, and I like listening to full albums, so I use the directory structure and filenames to organise them. Like this:

• música/⟨artist⟩/⟨album year⟩ - ⟨album name⟩[ - ⟨album number⟩]/⟨track number⟩ - ⟨track name⟩.[extension]

Album number is only added when necessary.

Albums with multiple artists can get a bit tricky. If it’s just a pair of artists co-creating an album, I create an ⟨artist⟩ folder for the pair and that’s it. But if there’s an artist per track or something like this, I dump them into música/AADCTS. “AADCTS” is an acronym for “aleatório, artista desconhecido, trilha sonora” (random, unknown artist, soundtrack), I use it for the sake of the collation order. So, for example:

• música/Kayah, Bregović/1999 - Kayah i Bregović/02 - To nie ptak.mp3
• música/AADCTS/1994 - The Glory of Gershwin/15 - Somebody Loves Me.mp3

Note the artist name (Meatloaf) is missing from the path of the second track. But it’s present in the tags. Remember when I said standardisation saves you headaches later on?

Different writing systems can get a bit tricky, too. My approach depends on if I can read it or not:

• música/Ария/2006 - Армагеддон/05 - Мессия.mp3 (I can read Cyrillic)
• música/Onmyo-Za/2011 - Kishi Bojin/03 - Ubugi.mp3 (I don’t read kanji yet)

The mess people do with Japanese transliteration drives me crazy, and it itches me to convert everything into Kunrei-shiki. But I’m not fixing it, perfect is enemy of good.

“But what about library software?” — personally? I hate those. But if you like them, just be extra cautious with your tags; otherwise the library software will do dumb stuff like showing “Camisa De Vênus”, “Camisa De Venus” and “CAMISA DE VENUS” as three separated artists, and refusing to play the whole album because of that.

4 - share/access

Part of the sharing is seeding whatever I’ve downloaded. I make sure to keep the files, as I downloaded them, available for others for at least two weeks. If I need to convert files I do so separately.

Additionally, my files are also shared across my SMB network, read only, with anonymous login. That means I can access them from anywhere at home — and my guests too. (My BIL often uses this.)

Since I use MP3 usually I don’t need to install additional software in my devices, but if you’re using something like OGG Vorbis you might need to do so. VLC is typically enough for me.

For some people, it might be also useful to create a few playlists, in .m3u or a similar format. How you organise them is up to you, but if I were to do so I’d probably create some directory just for them.