Hello from an old MPD user

[the_bertrum]

I like visuals and album art, and would very much prefer that bands that start with "The" are alphabetized ignoring the article (e.g., The Police sorts under P, not T). 

Visual and Album Art are handled very nicely by the moOde Web UI, I never feel the need to use anything else. You can add any string you like to the list of things to ignore when sorting, "The" is there by default.

I've got a pretty sizable MP3 and FLAC music collection that I have on a NAS split by folders (mp3 and HIRESAUDIO). Any advice on library management, especially how to signify easily FLAC vs MP3 albums would be appreciated also if people have thoughts.

A simple Artist/Album hierarchy works well, but if your tags are in decent order then other set ups work. Also built in to moOde and badges to show the encoding, and search features to find only hi-res and so on. The searches can be saved and used as "library views" as well.

All included in stock moOde, I'm confident you'll love it.