Obviously, it’s a matter of taste… and of having some time to try different methods/configurations. I don’t like making playlists for albums: is completely unnecessary when the tracks are properly tagged. I do like playlists, however, for making my own compilations based on tracks that are already on the clip and/or belong to different albums.
Sorry for not answering before, but yes, WMP should do the tagging in the right way. But I don’t like it as a ripper… that is a step where I do want to have control. Moreover, you should use the WMA codec as the MP3 encoding of WMP seems not to be of great quality. WMA is OK, but many people doesn’t like it because is closed.
For transferring music to the Clip I used to use drag and drop in MSC mode, because I liked to have control over how things were organized… but then I realized that it didn’t matter at all how I organize things when browsing is tag-based. So I switched (back) to MTP and started using WMP, realizing that: a) database refreshing is much, much faster (specially with a 4Gb Clip) an b) it’s easier when you just want drag and drop a playlist and don’t want to bother wether each song in the playlist is already transferred or not. WMP will check that for you and (hopefully) you will not have duplicated tracks.
If you want to explore other tools, give CDex and Bonkenc a try for ripping. They are freeware.
