Chaos on my HDD

[huzki]

Most of you know this issue: Your collection of tunes gets bigger and bigger and you loose the overview. I tried several ways to organize the tunes on my HDD (by release, artist, label, style, ...) but all have their downsides. How do you sort your tunes? Any ideas? Does anyone for example use some kind of database software where you can find tunes by all the attributes mentioned above?

[joeki]

my digital downloads are sorted by year and then by artist (with label in the tag).

Fortunately the better part of the collection is still vinyl, which is sorted acording to label and then catalog number.