If i could just chime in with another 'collection' tidbit... you're about to undertake a major 'librarian' chore on. I'd suggest thinking about a naming convention template to apply to your entire collection. Now's the time, before you get you've gone too far and have to go back to change things. Two good free-ware programs that can help with mass renaming of tag info are FileRenamer and TagScanner. I think you can find both at Download.com. Personally, I like my artists displayed alphabetically, but my albums displayed chronologically... so i'd always name my albums in the following format: "(1992) Unplugged", which allowed me to easily organize and display the progression of albums by a particular artist. I also created a vast subdirectory system to help organize each genre/artist/album... and for those that I only ripped/kept a few songs of (far cry from a whole album), I'd name the 'album' tag on those songs as "Various" so that I could just play all the 'various' songs together, which made for a nice hodgepodge listening experience. Anyways... just something to think about before you get too deep into this project of yours. Be prepared to spend 100s of hours ripping, tagging, and embedding album covers to get a kickass digital collection that friends will be envious of.
Cheers!
