Hard drive file management?


Hi, all
I have started ripping my CDs to a dedicated hard drive using EAC and the FLAC format. Things are going fine. However, a friend who ripped his CD collection a year or so ago into WAV files using the Windows Media Player tells me that his files ended up in individual album folders. When I open my music directory, there is one long list of files. I can see that if I rip a lot of CDs, It could get difficult to locate individual albums or songs if I wished to manipulate the files. I can't find any means of organizing files in the EAC program. Is there something that I'm missing? I am not having any problems with playback using a Logitech Touch--it seems to be able to differentiate the albums and artwork, so there is no issue with day-to-day useage, but if I wanted to copy or transfer single songs or albums finding them could be confusing.
This is all pretty new to me, and I appreciate any help or knowledge about this.

Bill
wbs
Thanks to all for the replies. I have gone through a couple of the tutorials and I think I now have a better understanding. I was expecting a little more from EAC than there is--maybe more along the lines of what Sgs is getting from Dbpoweramp. I am now creating artist and album folders and aside from a little more work than I expected all is OK. I have about 650 CDs to rip, and was hoping for a lazier solution but this is fine. It only has to be done once, after all.

Bill

only has to be done once... if you back up along the way. Don't wait till the jobs done.

and I'm interested in finding out how many ROM drives you go thru ripping nearly 700 CDs. I burned up two... or wore 'em out enough I didn't want to use them any more. lol

Everything matters, and it all adds up in the end.

Take your time, it's not a race. Hurrying probably cost me an extra ROM drive.... maybe. Sony's worked best for me. I bought an LG and it died about six months or so on, and LG replaced it. It's died again. LG won't replace it again, as they go from the orig unit's purchase date... not the replacement units sent date. So no mo LG for me.
With a large number of CDs, it might be better to go with a CD ripping service. Google 'CD ripping service' and you'll get lots of options and reviews. It's usually about $1 per CD (usually goes down with volume), but you can save a lot of time and wear and tear on your computer's CD drive. You get a choice of formats, and some of the services will manually enter metadata and artwork for CDs that aren't in the database.
Some programs such as JRiver has option to reorganize the files automatically based on artist and album title. No need to manually shuffle the directories.
I use two programs you may want to look into.
1. For ripping/converting I use dbpoweramp CDripper (it comes with the dbpoweramp suite) does the same quality work as EAC and also has accuraterip and can do lookups to ensure you get an accurate rip. It supports FLAC, wav, etc. and can harness multiple core/processor machines which is what I like. It also can rip your CD's to a dynamically generated file structure that you can define (like "mymusic/ /album/") -- pretty nice. I think MediaMonkey can also do that.
2. For file management/tagging, etc. I use Tag&Rename. It can look up albums through CDDB or even Amazon and import artwork, rename files, etc. It's a pretty good application.

I don't work for any of these companies and have no financial gain by recommending them... I just like them enough to recommend you look into them that's all.