Texasranger
Yup, getting all the tags correctly filled in will greatly enhance your listening pleasure.
The ones that normally get overlooked are genre and year, both are extremely useful for selecting music in smart playlists.
The sub directory structure has nothing to do with playlists.
Default smartplaylist 1, I believe is every song in the database.
There are lot’s of ways to create playlists. The Smart ones are created on the fly by a series of selection criteria, you could Amarok or any of the other MP3 players, alot of them have the ability to select multiple MP3s and save a playlist as either a .m3u or .pls file that firefly can read if so enabled in the configuration.
I prefer to use only smartplaylists, and a lot of those playlists are based upon the contents of the “Group” tag in iTunes. This allows me to create nested playlists and make for very quick selection. But that’s the way I do it. I have also used MusicIP Mixer for creating playlists based upon the mood of the music, that is usually a good way for me to listen to artists I wouldn’t normally choose.