Album tags, Various Artists Compilation, own mixes et. al.

Hi folks!

I've read so many posts and hints all over the web now but I get more and more stumped at all. So last hope is to ask you experts outside of my little world livingroom. General question is how to identify and do special, automated tagger-action for normal albums, band/artist compilations, official compilations of various artists and single files which belongs to nowhere else.

Easiest case to organize seems to be a simple album with one artist. I already use the script below to rename and move affected files to my preferred folder structure. Example: Artist "Robbie Williams" - Album "Escapology" - Title "How Peculiar" is processed to "D:\MusicDB\Albums\W\Robbie Williams\[2002] Escapology\01 Robbie Williams - How Peculiar.mp3". Fairly automated without manual adjustments.

 Alben/
$firstalphachar(%artistsort%)/
%artist%/
$if(%date%,[$left(%date%,4)]) %album%/
$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%-,)$num(%tracknumber%,2) %artist% - %title% 

Almost easy, but not without any open questions, are compilations of one artist, e. g. "Best Of" or "Greatest Hits" albums. I see that they are marked as compilations by musicbrainz and I worry about how several players, phones, cars and OSs will interpretate this tag. I would like them to be seen as "normal" albums with same folder structure and should also be listned in players album view as the simple ones. The simple script above does not care about the compilation tag and places the files as expected: "D:\MusicDB\Albums\W\Robbie Williams\[2004] Greatest Hits\01 Robbie Williams - Old Before I Die.mp3". Am I right to go on like this then or do I have to modify some tags like ALBUMARTIST or COMPILATION to make this naming and tagging convention work in certain environments in future? Kids are growing and I expect also Apple products will be use here in future.

Now things become more complex. Various Artists. Let's start with compilations you can buy somewhere. First approach should be to adjust the right folder structure. I would like to have it like this: D:\MusicDB\Sampler\Public\The Dome\Volume 54\CD1\1-01 K'naan - Wavin' Flag.mp3. I didn't find a way to identify the serie name ("The Dome" in this example). Albumname is tagged as The Dome, Volume 54. Any hints how to split this string to get the leading serie out of the Album tag??

Private compilations are problematic... I would like Picard to adjust and complete the tags by ARTISTSORT and so on. Most of my (old) compilations are burned to CD-ROM only, no mp3-files already prepared. I use BonkEnc/Lame to encode the mp3s and the probably set CDTEXT to pre-tag them. Afterwards I run the track analysation process by Picard --> several albums/compilations found for my tracks. Names and so on are fixed then. Fine, but is there a way to enforce Picard to prefer single or album entries instead of compilations? Which tags I have to redefine manually to mark this set of files as an private compilation? And how to modify the script above to recognize this set as an private collection and use my rules for folder structure afterwards? Goal: D:\MusicDB\Sampler\Private\MCMLXXX's\Volume 1\01 Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy.mp3

Last but not least: How do you organize single music files you do not have the complete album in your library? E.g. one-hit-wonders or one nice track but rest of the album trash? I thought about to divide them by genre, but I suspect that this will be hard to solve in an almost automated way. After this very long post I should discuss this later...

Any suggestions, remarks, critic or what else is welcome! Thanks!

Tubebend