You're making the problem a lot harder than it needs, or ought, to be. The most telling example, IMO, is the Aphex Twin one...
> Oh, and his real name is Richard David James. What are you
> supposed to use for the file system directories and files
> name? His name? The most common nickname? Both? One file
> system solution is to have symbolic links (do you link
> Richard David James to Aphex Twin, or vice versa?). For
> tags, if you don't want to lose information, this is
> another story...
You should—obviously—not attempt to "link" AFX to Aphex Twin to GAK to Blue Calx to etc. etc. The artist behind all of the monikers has made a deliberate decision to release work under different names. Organize accordingly.
Many of your nightmare scenarios appear to be a result of the same kind of over-thinking, or invention of nonsensical requirements. How are you supposed to deal with Japanese artist names? It literally doesn't matter—pick a scheme you can understand, and be consistent. How are you supposed to deal with multiple artists? List them, separated by commas, in the artist field. If they appear on an album released by a different group or person, use the "album artist" ID3 field. And since (if?) you use the ID3 fields to store your metadata, and presumably navigate your collection through an interface over that metadata, all of your questions regarding how to store files physically on disk are totally irrelevant, as long as you pick some scheme which doesn't generate conflicts. The default iTunes structure (Artist/Album/01 - Song Title.mp3) seems to work fine, for example.
Well, it's the same person behind. Even if the artist tried to give a different "personality" to his music over the time, following all his creations is actually a good listening experience. The "hey I just want to listen to the musical evolution of this guy" isn't a rare feeling IMO. Grabbing all his nicknames is kind of a problem.
Of course, you have a point, I'm making the problem harder than it needs, and you can just don't care about most of these issues. Hey, that's actually to the conclusion I reached. But still, I believe the current solutions are not optimal if you want to match N songs, store all the related "context" information, or just keep a consistent way of storing them.
But that's not a problem, either. In my music collection I have, e.g. tags ARTIST=AFX and FILED_UNDER=Aphex Twin. Then when you make a playlist with your favorite music player, you can just sort things by FILED_UNDER, if you prefer. What's so hard about that?
Interesting, so you have a way of making the relationship at the end. Now I could start nitpicking about how you decide to make the link to Aphex Twin and not his name (or another nick), and how would you make that decision for any similar cases.
Note that I don't consider this issue the main problem, it's just one I hit a few times, and I wasn't able to select a correct solution.
Also, discogs will track which albums were released under different artist tags. Foobar+discogs tagger combination lets you pick, if you want to use most common general name (so all tracks are Aphex twin), or the alternative name that songs were released under (aka: AFX songs stay as AFX).
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This is same issue as a book ''Running Man'' (yes, followed by a movie with Arnold). Was it written by Richard Bachman, or Steven King? How does your public library list book?
Sure, but the answer is you just make an arbitrary decision that feels right. Same thing with name ordering and the other issues you mention. There isn't much benefit to coming up with some elaborate system of rules for these things -- after all, the goal is to create a categorization that is easy for you to find things with, not to generate the timeless perfect metadata which all humans agree is correct.
> The default iTunes structure (Artist/Album/01 - Song Title.mp3) seems to work fine, for example.
It only works fine for basic rock and pop (because even if there is a composer different from the interpreter, that's optional). It starts breaking for remix albums released under a given artist (the original composer) where one song may have been remixed with three different people, now you have to start infecting the track names with the remixer.
And then you've got classical music, where each of the composer, orchestra, conductor and soloist may be considered the artist, but none really is because the authorship of this precise interpretation is a combination of all of them, and any missing will lead to a collision. TFA also touches upon original sountracks (of movies, animes or games) which regularly open whole new cans of worm, and special compilations such as Dark was the Night (40-odd artists — excluding composer for covers — for 31 tracks in a single album, good luck handling that one without relying on the "various artists" crutch)
> where one song may have been remixed with three different
> people, now you have to start infecting the track names
> with the remixer.
For what it's worth, I don't consider that "infecting". It's really the only sane way to handle huge collaborative works.
There are always exceptions which break any categorization scheme. The point is to treat them as exceptions, ie. fold them into the 90% model as well as you can, rather than restructuring your model to accomodate for 100% of every conceivable artistic license.
> And then you've got classical music,
This one _is_ interesting, but I solved it (personally) when I realized I only cared about the original composer (eg. Mozart) in terms of "artist", and the minimum nomenclature to disambiguate movements, etc. in terms of "title". Trivia like the performing orchestra is perfectly well homed in the album title, or ignored entirely. I admit I'm only interested in listening to classical music, not cataloging it to some deeper academic purpose.
Many of your nightmare scenarios appear to be a result of the same kind of over-thinking, or invention of nonsensical requirements. How are you supposed to deal with Japanese artist names? It literally doesn't matter—pick a scheme you can understand, and be consistent. How are you supposed to deal with multiple artists? List them, separated by commas, in the artist field. If they appear on an album released by a different group or person, use the "album artist" ID3 field. And since (if?) you use the ID3 fields to store your metadata, and presumably navigate your collection through an interface over that metadata, all of your questions regarding how to store files physically on disk are totally irrelevant, as long as you pick some scheme which doesn't generate conflicts. The default iTunes structure (Artist/Album/01 - Song Title.mp3) seems to work fine, for example.