New user - help with directory structure?

[simbun]

Just some further food for thought...

dBpoweramp Music Converter is a great suite of products, but it's strength is really in streamlining the ripping AND tagging in one step, so if you're not going to use it for the tagging it might not be worth the investment. That being said it's still a great ripper but there are other free options out there - especially if you're not going to be using the Music Converter functionality either. I don't use it for a few reasons, the first being that it stores most of its settings in the registry (and it doesn't provide the option to back them up) and the second is that it doesn't use CUETools database for ripping verification (a more feature rich and up to date verification method).
If you do stick with dBpoweramp remember to add the 'CUE Sheet' DSP otherwise you'll lose the CD pre-gap information which is useful when verifying files after the inital rip (this isn't available on the mac version).

If you're on windows I assume you're planning to store as FLAC, if on a mac I guess you're restricted to ALAC. I've also found external album artwork to be more compatible than embedded, but this is really only an issue if you're planning on comverting your music to be used on other systems e.g. Sonos doesn't like embedded album art when using mp3's with ID3v2.4.

You've made a good start in that you're already thinking about how you want to browse your music, so one thing I would say is don't be afraid of adding too much information in the tags, it's trivial to get rid of them yet it can be quite difficult to add them in at a later date e.g. from your original post it seems like you already have a natural division of how you might want to browse your music, so make sure you store Classical/Jazz/Piano/Trumpet/Soundtracks/Poprock somewhere, and probably best not to use Genre as most tagging apps without proper setup will overwrite it.

I wouldn't give the file structure much thought at all at this point, I'd rip a smallish number of discs and just get your tagging down, and once you're happy that you've captured everything you need it's trivial to move the files into your desired structure (based on the tags you have in the files). Picard should offer this, but as a one-off exercise you could also use foobar or mp3tag to do this for you.

Finally, be prepared to review this constantly ;-)