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To be clear, the delimiter I use is ' - ' (that is, space-dash-space). And if I have an artist or track with hyphens, I just don't use spaces there. So: Sleater-Kinney - One Beat - 03 - Oh!.mp3

This works extremely well for me, too.

In addition to this, I've taken to including the genre and year in the file name, so that I've got every single tag field represented in the file name. My Jemplode configuration looks like this:

{genre} - {artist} - {source} - {year} - {tracknr:2} - {title}{ext}

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Although a cooler idea is using different delimiters for each type of data, like put artist in parens, cd title in brackets, track number in braces, etc., etc. That way, you could include whatever information you want without worrying so much about sticking to a set scheme.

No, this doesn't work. Because what if you want to use one of those character types within the file name, and want to have some software parse that data out of the name. For instance, at one point I had put the year in parenthesis. And then I wanted to do a filenames-to-tags pass on a certain group of tunes. And "Was (Not Was)" got assigned a pretty funky year tag. No, I think the space-dash-space thing is the best delimiter solution.

I go a step further. This is my new tagging and file naming strategy, and it's worked well for me so far:

Never Allow A Windows-Illegal Character In Any Field

What I mean is... If the field has a question mark or a slash or something, delete it from the field completely. For instance, using the Was (Not Was) example above, the album name is really "Are You Okay?", but I simply title it "Are You Okay". Or another example, "Foreplay/Long Time" from Boston's first album becomes "Foreplay, Long Time" or perhaps "Foreplay- Long Time".

At first you might think that the above is a bit obsessive, and also a pain in the neck when correcting existing tags. But I've found it's the least amount of work later on because of what it has gained me. What has it gained me, you ask? Here's what:

File names will always, 100 percent, character-for-character, match the tags. So I can freely do filenames-to-tags passes, or vice-versa, and have them always work and always look good and always be correct, on any system. Woops, didn't tag that file? No problem, right click on it and have Tag Studio fix it for you. There are a bunch of other cases where I've found having the tags and the file names match exactly is convenient, and they're all tiny little things, but they all make managing the files and tags a lot easier.
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Tony Fabris