That's utterly incredible!!
If you're willing, could you explain how your system works?
Well, ok.
It was/is much easier to sort digital music just because of the physical aspect. Also much easier to move digital music around from drive to drive as well as it being portable. Sorting is also much easier, but is time consuming in the beginning.
So, when my last Windows machine utterly failed causing gigs of music, video and technical documents to be lost I decided to purchase my first Mac. I purchased a PowerMac G5 2.5 dual processor machine along with several external hard drives for backup. Technology in place it was time to figure out how to start organizing what I have in digital format. At the time I only had 50gb of music (not much), but it was all a mess. No album art, not properly tagged, etc.
I found a site that I really like, allmusic.com. By entering an artist name, results displayed genre and discography of the artist (there are more choices), but these are the only ones that really interested me. For most artists and cds there was/is also album art.
I created a music folder, within which were folders of people I got music from, I place I was when I got the music. But this soon turned out to be bad for sorting as I have the same artist in several locations all containing different albums. Not too good. Time to start over.
So I just created a music folder with genres as the subfolders. Within the subfolders are the artists with entire discographies in them (at least full albums if not the entire artists library). Next I would move an artist into the correct genre (per allmusic.com), import the album into itunes, properly tag the album and add artwork. Importing only a few albums a day, syncing to my ipod, listening to the cds, giving a rating and creating smart playlists seemed to take forever. It was longer to import my original 50gb than I imagined, but my system of organizing took hold and as my collecting sped up it was easier to sort a few gigs at a time. I would clean things up and then get some more music a few weeks later. This process would repeat every few weeks for the next 3-4years. I would get music from the library, people I would meet, I setup a music swap at the apple store in NYC. Eventually, I had more music than I could store and didn't want to buy any more external hard drives. It was time to start a clean up, not sure how much music I deleted all together but it was more than I wanted/needed. I traded some music for Apple gear, records and gave tons away just for the seer amusement of "wow, thats a lot of music".
The records are a similar story that hasn't ended yet. Probably never will. Taking records of the shelves, piling them elsewhere while looking at the artist and genre(allmusic.com) then putting this back on the shelves is an ongoing process. The records are somewhere sorted into genres, but then within the genre nothing is alphabetical yet. This will take more time and in the past few years, my motivation to alphabetize as I sort has gone down to zero. It is too much, I am overwhelmed and rarely pull out the records to listen to them. I have too much going on in life now to dedicate the time it requires to finish this, it's a full time job.
No big story, nothing too revealing either. It was and still is the way I organize my music so I can find things in my old and senile days.
The whole point of it now is that I have a massive collection of records, tapes and digital music that I hope to leave to my son one day. I was taught to have a love and appreciation of music and I want to teach my son the same.