I've only got about 5000 tracks on the empeg and my home music PC at the moment and for that many it's a piece of cake to just do:

Artist
Album

for directory structure on the PC.

On the empeg, I have an "all artists" playlist, then a-c, d-f etc., then "Heavy", "compilations", "Covers", "soundtracks", "songs for t'wife" etc

It's all accessible with only a few spins of the knob - just the way we like it