I'm currently ripping my CD's into a hierarchy that is only one level deep. Artist is a dir and then all of the tracks are underneath that dir with album title, track #, and track name in the name of the file. Should I be creating subdirectories for each album?

I would, yes. If listening to a given album is important to you, then you should definitely create a subdirectory for each album. That way you'll get the albums as playlists under the artist. Note that this doesn't prevent you from playing the whole artist. You can hit the "play" button at any point in the tree and it'll play all the branches below that point.

My current structure on the Empeg is as follows:

artist/album
artist/album
artist/album
artist/album
(etc.)
Various
- Low key -
- Tony's Favorites-
- Demo -
- Test Audio -
- Filks -
- LAN Party -

This allows me to scroll to a given artist alphabetically, while still having my "mood" playlists show up first (hence the hyphens).

Note that those "mood" playlists don't exist on my PC anywhere, they are just copies of tracks from the artist playlists, they were created entirely in Emplode.

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Tony Fabris