As the list of tunes gets bigger, it becomes harder to keep track of and find your ways around. It's great to have a huge number of tunes available, but the bigger a list gets, the more it swamps you with Too Much Information. The search / filtering stuff is one solution, this is another. Structure your lists, divide things up into appropriate sub-headings.

There's More Than One Way To Do It

I just wanted to work that phrase in somewhere, because this site is written in Perl, and that's what the perl people chant at every opportunity. It's a very ABCish statement, as well. There are indeed many ways you could use this system of fields to group bunches of tunes together according to your taste. And I daresay some of you will ...

this is one of them

... but this seems to me to be such an obvious requirement that I've decided to have the site deal with it in some extra ways. Use the "Collection" field (ABC key %%Collection:).

You set values for this in the normal ways (via the editor page here or by editing stuff elsewhere and uploading it), but the site does some extra things with it that don't happen for any other field. People whose tunes use this field get an extra link on the 'list of people with tunes' front page. This takes viewers to a page which lists the collections they've assigned tunes to, where there are links that will list the tunes in that collection, download them as ABC, and so on, in the normal way.

Of course, these lists are the same ones you'd get if you used the search page to find values for that field, or any other; the special bit is the intervening 'Browse collections' page, which includes pieces of text about each collection. Logged-in users can write these via the "edit your collection labels' link on the Tunes front page (where it will be offered if you have any tunes with values for the field). The "description" text is just passed through to the browser to display - which has the result that if you write HTML markup here, browsers will display it according to the usual rules; if you are familiar with HTML, you can write your own mini-webpage here. Or if you can't be bothered with that, Just Ordinary Plain Text is fine too. It's up to you. The editing page for this also allows you to give a 'label' for each field, which will be be used in the go-to-a-list link instead of the literal value of the field if you supply it. This can help make things comprehensible, and more pleasant to look at, but you can leave it empty if you like, no problem.

It can be very simple

Just edit a tune, type in a value for this field, save it, and admire your new 'collections' page. Go write some descriptive text for it and see how it's displayed. But be careful not to use any colon ( : ) characters in the value, because ...

Or it can be as complex as you like

In the context of the Collection field, any colon ( : ) that's part of the value (ie, I don't mean the 'usual' first one which just ends the key word) is a special marker which breaks the field up into a set of hierarchical values; the part to the right is understood as a sub-heading under the part to the left. That is, you could write a line like
%%Collection:Main heading:Sub-heading:Part 17
and it will appear on the 'Browse collections' page in a structured way - there's a top-level heading of 'Main heading', a 2nd-level heading of 'Sub-heading', and a 3rd-level heading of 'Part 17'. If you go look at the 'edit collection labels' page, you will see that you have separate entries for each of these parts, where you can write whatever descriptions are appropriate to that level of generality. There is no limit to the number of levels you can have here, apart from your ability to keep track of them, this is sheer overkill. It's probably easier to use than to describe - play with it & see what happens. If you find yourself needing this kind of organisation, I think you'll probably see the point of it fairly quickly.

For a starter, my own page has some examples of what happens.

Having to write these values into the editor is clumsy, but it hardly seems worth devising a complicated pointyclicky, and I can't actually think of one that would be any more transparent, without getting into large amounts of work that I don't really want to do. After all, you'll configure the editor to show them in a listbox, so you only have to type each value once. Notice also the "only show your own values for this field" option, which is set for this field by default.

but it's not the only way

But of course, these don't get you the good extra display stuff I just described. If you have groups of tunes for which you'd like to write some kind of commentary on the group as a whole, Collection is the way to get this.