I had that problem too. Boy winamp started slowly when it had to read 1260+ tracks! I also keep them in directories by band and then make winamp playlists for each band, then I have a 'master' playlist. I got sick of loading winamp each time I wanted one album or band etc. so I made an html file with links to each band's winamp playlists.
Like this:
A HREF="file:///C:/Music/deftones/deftones.m3u">Deftones /A
A HREF="file:///D:/Music/Danzig/danzig.m3u">Danzig /A
A HREF="file:///C:/Music/Misc/ECW Mixes/ecw.m3u">ECW Mixes /A
A HREF="file:///C:/Music/Fear Factory/fearfactory.m3u">Fear Factory /A
A HREF="file:///D:/Music/Foo Fighters/foo.m3u">Foo Fighters /A
A HREF="file:///D:/Music/Godsmack/godsmack.m3u">Godsmack /A
A HREF="file:///D:/Music/GnR/gnr.m3u">Guns n' Roses /A
(I removed the < and > so the actual code would show up)
I think it is pretty slick.
Heck if you want it to be really convienent (but lose system resources) use (or integrate) this html file in to Win98's active desktop system and have all of the links right on your desktop.
Jake
email me at
[email protected] and I'll email you the whole file to ya.
ps look at the example.zip to see how it looks!