My current layout is as follows:

In the root directory, I have a bunch of Artists playlists. Beneath those, I have album playlists.

In the root directory, I also have some "Mood" playlists. I enclose the names of these mood playlists in parentheses so that they show up first alphabetically in the playlists menu. For example, some of my mood playlists are:

(Low Key)
(LAN Party)
(Demo)

The mood playlists show up as the very first items in the playlists menu, with the artists appearing afterwards.

In Emplode, I view the Root playlist in order of "Position" and then carefully order the list so that the artists are listed first and then the mood playlists are listed last. This allows for the ub-shuffle-around-song trick to work (see here for details).

Usually, I play the entire player, shuffled by Least Recently Played. This is usually accomplished by pressing "down down down" on the front panel.

In this mode, the "next track" button gets used a lot. When a new song starts, if it's not the most perfect song for my mood at the time, I press Next until I get to one that is.

Note that I'm not usually skipping the song because I dislike it (there isn't a lot of stuff on the player I dislike), I'm skipping it because it's not absolutely perfect for my mood at that exact time. Usually it takes only a few "skips" before a song comes up that I want to hear. Do THAT with a CD changer, heh.

If I hear a song that happens to fit well within an album, I press the "0" button on the remote control and it unshuffles around the current song, and I'm dropped into the middle of that album. For instance, if I'm shuffling the whole player and "Money" comes up, I press "0" and can listen to the remainder of Side Two of Dark Side of the Moon uninterrupted.

If you simply want to hear more of a given artist, or more of a given album, and you don't care about the order, use the Tweak Order feature.

If you have stuff on your player that you need to keep there, but that you'd rather not have show up in a "down down down" shuffle, then use either Wendy Filters or the Ignore As Child tag to handle that situation.

Note that in a future release of the software, we won't even need to create Artist/Album playlists any more, those will appear automatically as part of the "Soup" views.

Hmm. This post is starting to look like a FAQ entry. Maybe I should put it in there?