I've been ripping my CDs to digital for about 10-12 years, and for about 8-10 years, all my new purchases of music have been in digital form. My favored method of organizing my stuff has been by using subdirectories:

and so forth.

It seems that every music program that has the ability to manage your music collection wants to use MP3 tags to do so. I severely do not want that behavior. I would like to be able to automatically create a library based on pathnames.

Winamp cooperates with my directory structure, but Rhythmbox / Songbird / Exaile seem to be hard-coded to just read id3 tags and operate according to that.

Ideas?

xmms?

In linux I don't use GUI players, only CLIs. I use mplayer and sox with playshell to manage and play my musics. There are also other good CLI/curses based applications like music on console and MPD.

Hi,

mplayer or audacious (last does use tags if available, but not needed).

My 2c.

MPlayer, VLC, Kaffeine?

Yeh I agree with konsolebox, console players are often excellent. Moc is a very good player as its also very quick to create a playlist and has several options for viewing; one of which is from directories. Cmus is also good, I had to use that for a while as I was getting a segfault in moc.

You can't beat mpg123 and ogg123! They can even play playlist files!

If you're using mpg123 and ogg123, maybe you should also try sox?

MPlayer also has its own playlist handler by the way.

When playing single files I'd prefer sox. It's interface is pretty simple and sweet.

There is also a free version for mpg123, it's mpg321. According to its homepage it's starting to release newer updates again (only now since 2002).