After much thought on the subject, I decided that the optimal way that I would prefer to browse through my MP3 collection is:

Rating (1 to 5 stars)...Genre....Artist....Album

This would allow me to browse through my collection without having to see all of the junk I have in there (1 and 2 stars) that I will rarely want to listen to.

Now, I'm very disappointed that Winamp 5 skipped the Genre step ... hopefully they'll at least add that in the near future.

...but are there any Music Library programs (or even better, streaming audio devices such as the Audiotron) that would allow me to sort in this order including rating? Since ID3v2 tags don't include a rating field, I guess this would really have to be handled entirely by the library program.

Thanks.

Kyle

Actually ID3v2 does have the "Popularimeter" field, which stores a rating of 1 (worst) to 255 (best). However I don't know of any program that's ever made use of that field.

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt - "4.17. Popularimeter"

good read-
I dont know why apple didnt use this field instead of storring the data outside of the meta tag

wasnt clear to me from the read but I dont know why id3 doesnt have muliple artist fields - its major downfall IMHO