Let me apologize for putting a damper on this conversation, but the big thing I see, is that even though a track may be "duplicated" in multiple albums, I find that there are usually different versions (a Live Version, the Original Version, a Remixed Version, etc.) So the idea would be definitely to keep this optional, and while a great idea, as storage becomes cheap, it may become irrelevant....

[quote="Agouti"]No, I hadn't looked at your script[/quote]
No, I am not trying to start a flame, but you are. You came here with attitude "my solution is the best" almost immediately after I wrote information about my script. Two years nothing was happened, only empty talks and now when I spent my time writing this you are talking about same idea which I posted in this same thread two years ago. If you are too lazy to read just one post before yours and to follow supplied link and see what I made, I don't know why I should discuss about all of this with you. If you install and try mentioned script, you would see that it has almost all what you are suggesting. Even if it is missing some thing which you want to see, I think it is more fair first to post such request in the script thread, then to write completely new script which would do almost same things like mine.

Yes, I already read your first post completely and I cannot see that you mentioned any kind of automation. But, just for your information, this script has your newly mentioned automation. If you move files (whether they are masters or .asx's), paths are automatically updated and everything works fine. If you read my description in the first post of the script thread, you would know that. Yes, this works if you rename files as well. Yes, there is an option to recover broken links. Yes, you could choose an option if you want playstats to be updated for .asx files or master files whenever you play some .asx file. Yes, if you chose that option, the script will ask you if you want to transfer playstats from all .asx files to master files.

Speaking on idea to store album info, I don't know what is a connection with this kind of script since those things are totally unrelated. The independent script which would create files with such information could be made and could be used for all albums, not only for those which have duplicated tracks. There are also a solutions to avoid repeated playback of duplicates which are mentioned recently in the Scripting forum, and such solutions are not (and should not) be related with this kind of script (the solution with the .asx files is the simplest one - just create a Magic Nodes filter or auto-playlist which would not play files with an .asx extension). In meantime I added an option to create redirections for audio files (e.g. a .mp3 file which redirects to a .flac file), so you could use this script even if you prefer duplicates instead of .asx files. Now, do you have some real argument against my script?

[quote="ZvezdanD"]So, why do you think your solution would be better than mine?[/quote]

My, aren't we touchy...

No, I hadn't looked at your script at the time (oh how mad you must be), but it doesn't do everything I'm after. Yes, it does the redirection rather well, i like the asx format - but if you had read through the whole post, and not just zeroed in and tried to start a flame, I'm after other things as well. More automation, for a start. What happens when the destination file is moved or renamed? Does the track still appear multiple times in the library (an issue for autodj, as the track will get more plays and not be subject to rules about playing the same track twice in a given length of time)? Is there any process for the recovery of the link? I like the idea of a file to store album info, like album rating, info blurb, album release date, classifications etc.

You have enough posts under your belt to not attack people after reading the first simply because they don't want to use your script... I'm exploring possible solutions, and while yours looks nice and polished and does it's job rather well, it doesn't achieve some of the things I'm after. I want to be able to play a particular album, and play all the tracks in that, but also tell MM to play a bunch of albums that contain the track and not have the track come up multiple times. I think I will just aim at a script for generating these searches/playlists and cleaning duplicate tracks out, based on bitrate/track length.

Space these days is only a minor consideration (for us poor souls who can't get tracks in FLAC), I'd really like (though it won't happen) to have multiple albums stored in the metadata, is such a fashion that MM and DAPs would also recognize it... because you can have the same track in slightly different version in multiple albums (a minute longer or shorter, or a different dub) so you may not want to delete the other versions, but that doesn't mean you want them to appear in autoplaylists and sync lists.

[quote="Agouti"]I think the best way would be to delete all but one copy of the mp3, and in the albums now missing the file have a xml which has a extension that MM would recognize as a link.[/quote]
Did you try my script? Did you even take a look at my description from specified link? My script has almost exactly what you wrote. It deletes all same audio files except one file and it replaces them with small XML based files which have included all MM fields. MM 3.1 with my script recognize such files, it displays all their metadata including album arts, it allows you to modify those metadata and even better it could play such files. Even more better, when you open such files into Windows Media Player, almost all important MM fields are visible (except rating). So, why do you think your solution would be better than mine?

I think the best way would be to delete all but one copy of the mp3, and in the albums now missing the file have a xml which has a extension that MM would recognize as a link. We already have extra stuff tacked in folders for album art, not a new concept.

The param would have to be most likely be just the audio signature (MM already does that for duplicates), though you could also include artist and title incase the file gets modified (so you can attempt to recover). You can't really use path softlinks as described earlier - what happens when the directory or file gets renamed? Especially outside of MM?

The other way would be to use one of the custom fields you get with MP3's (have a look in properties, classification). You *do* get 5 fields, but most likely you would just use album name, track # for that album and maybe a row ID to the MM DB entry for that album - but you would get a lot of overhead in MM when you have an album and then have to search through the rest of the databse looking for any errant tracks missing from it....


If nobody else has made a move that way I'll have a go at making a script for the one or the other over my uni holidays.

The custom fields would be far easier, as the extra meta is kept within the files metadata , and not tacked somewhere that nobody else would ever support... but most likely do it both ways...


Yet another way is to (again using xml) have a little file in each album folder which stores a bunch of details about the album (which isn't normally stored as well, bonus!) like album rating, track list (which would be used to hunt down errant tracks) etc

You could try my new [url=http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=39312]Track Redirection[/url] script. It could be used for the "one song-many albums" situations and have an option to update playstats of one master track whenever you play some track which refers to it. Of course, I am using .asx files as redirection files that I suggested before.

No this is not possible, but there are 2 date fields that can be used: Date & Original Date.

can we also do a multiple album year using the ; notation?

To clarify, MediaMonkey already supports multiple artists per track by separating them using the ; semicolon.

Associating a track with several albums could probably be achieved with the same solution as currently used for multiple Artists and Genre's, but might require a database design change (breaking backwards compatibility).

I think you want to change your request from short cuts to database links. That is what I think you are asking for. The album and artist are in seperate tables. The album is linked to the song by an album id you would need a new link table between the album and tunes to allow multiple albums to be attached to the same tune.

It looks like it would be easy to allow several artists to be attached to the same tune. There is a link table there.
I don't believe you can link several artists to the same tune but the table structure allows for it. There are interface problems and performance problems to implement this. The big problem is getting the user to understand what is going on.

I would have liked the artist to be linked to the album then to the tune. That would create a problem if there was no album. I got some of them so I can see the pit falls. Maybe the MM structure is smarter.

I want this idea, or something like it, as well.

For instance, I just ripped all the CDs from a John Coltrane box set which contains tracks in the order they were recorded, not released. That's fine, but I'd like to have virtual albums (Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, ...) containing the appropriate songs. That way I can decide to listen to a particular album that he released in the 60s, or listen to (part of) the box set.

The interface I envisage is this:
* create a playlist with the songs I want in the correct order
* convert the playlist to an album (be prompted for the album name and album artist)
* add the cover art via CTRL-L as per normal

I doesn't seem like this feature is going to be implemented any time soon, so I'm going to make copies of the files and get what I want that way. The drawbacks of this:
* it's more cumbersome than what I described above
* metadata like rating and times played is now split
* wasted space, of course

The metadata and space issues don't really bother me, but this sure would be a nice feature.

i'm sticking with my idea for the time being, but it sorta makes me /boggle that i can make several playlists linked to a single song but it has to be done manually. ideally, to me, we could have a way to find duplicates and pick which to keep (some people like crappy quality over better) and have only one copy of a song that was exactly the same but linked to many playlists.

@lost: good idea, although with the limitations that Teknojnky has pointed out.

[b]Bundler wrote:[/b]
[quote]
is this so hard to do in the program?? it could take note of a repeat file and ask if we wanted to pick which to keep (choose from best quality, etc.) and then we could eliminate repeat songs that benefit nobody but the hard drive manufacturers.
[/quote]

@Bundler: Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but look at this script: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16681
It displays a report that allows the user to select which song to keep, and which to delete.

@Seeker: The 'tag' idea is probably the best idea, but that will take a lot of programming from the MM Development side to do. The reason would be that everytime you sync with your device, MM has to know to sync the FLAC file, but to convert it first, and then it also depends on which format your player uses (and which it uses best). And then of course there is the problem of moving the FLAC file... If you are not in MM, and you decide to move your entire directory to another drive, for instance, (and you don't have MM Gold), then the bigfile.flac.tag and the bigfile.mp3.tag file will not know where to find the original file.

@Everybody: If you want the same song in different albums, with the tags based on that album, then the best approach would be to actually have duplicates of your songs. Harddrives are cheap enough, and big enough (at least for my collection ;)) to store even the duplicates. Use this script to sort out the duplicates (http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13000) which also has a Duplicate OK node, into which you could add the duplicate songs from Greatest Hits, and Motion Picture Soundtrack albums. This will then not show any of the 3 files, that you actually have as duplicates.

The biggest problem with having linked files will always be, "What am I pointing to?" if the original file was moved or deleted? The only way of overcoming this, will be to have a 'link' in the original file, pointing to all the links created to point to it. And then having the OS decide what to do. But I seriously doubt Microsoft will be helping us out in this respect very soon.

Please don't bite my head off... I do like feeling that little bit of brain-weight on my sholders in the morning when I wake up ;) I was just expressing my opinions.

Reg'ds
Skywave

[quote="nojac"]The point is that some of us would like keep all albums complete without having to keep several copies of the track in the library.

But as storage becomes cheaper the problem gets smaller....[/quote]

Yes, and yes.

[quote="mr_btw"]Hi all.

Have recently started to port my collection to electronic format and, after a few months, have found Media Monkey to be great! This is my first post, so bear with me if this has been re/hashed before.

Yes, I am frankly amazed that no one has solved this problem yet.

My idea for a solution is a fairly simple one. Of course, it'd be specific to whomever adopted it (until it's standardized... :lol: ), but I think it's a fairly straightforward one.

Why not make a new file format for the duplicate tracks? These duplicate track files would essentially be shortcuts or soft links to the original. This new shortcut file would contain all of the meta-data specific to the duplicated track (like album art, track number, etc.), but, instead of music data, it would reference the original. (I'll leave the referencing how-to up to you -- I could even see this somehow being incorporated into your Virtual CD feature.)

So, each duplicate track would be something like 50 KB in size. Of course, the storage payoff would depend on the sample qualities, but I think it's definitely worth it. (Easy to say when I'm not doing the design or implementation.)

Of course, Media Monkey would have to be smart and know how to use these shortcut files to do the right thing during album playback, burning, syncing, ripping, etc.

So, if I had 1 song that appeared on 3 albums -- say the original album, a greatest hits, and some random compilation, I'd have:

- standard mp3 in the original album ~5 MB
- duplicate track file in greatest hits ~ 50 KB
- duplicate track file in compilation ~ 50 KB

For a savings of 9.9 MB. Not a whole lot, but it's just a start...

Anyway, there's my request and advice on how to fill it.

Thanks so much for making Media Monkey great.[/quote]

[quote="gege"]@mr_btw: man, I'm going to sue you! I've got this idea months ago!
I just wasn't smart enough request a patent for it

I'm serious: I really had this idea some time ago (exactly as you stated it, I mean). I would call it "Virtual mp3 (*.vmp3)"
And I think it would be the final solution for the duplicates problem:

- Virtual mp3s wouldn't be added to 'Duplicates' in 'Files to Edit';
- All the playcounts could be summed up in the original file, keeping consistency on how may times the *song* has been played, instead of a specific *file* containing that song;
- A lot of space would be saved (at least for me...);
- ...

IMO, a vmp3 file would have exactly the same structure a regular mp3 has:
ID3v2 + Audio Data + ID3v1
only the 'Audio Data' portion would contain the link to the original file, instead of real audio frames.[/quote]

In reading all this, I think the discussion has moved beyond what I think is the best idea of all - the one above (of course I think this - the above is my idea too.)

The reason the above is the 'best' idea to me is that it keeps all the specific metadata without repeating the large part - the audio. Such an idea would be extensible to even bigger video, once video has tagging standards.

Is tag used as an extension? If not, I could see this used as even a way to keep conversion issues clear. Say you have (like I do), your main file as flac, which is high quality and large. You also have a compilation album (which is a duplicate in flac, but different tags).

You also have an entire library for your mp3 files which are conversions for your mp3 player. Even that can get in the gigabytes, and is technically a converted duplicate.

So you could have:

bigfile.flac (with all the audio, and it's own track info)

otheralbum.flac.tag (with all the ideas above)

and

bigfile.mp3.tag (which should contain in tags bitrate and vbr).

Then, an intelligent system would properly: simply play the flac for all 3 if requested, but would also know to CREATE an mp3 from the flac if you are moving it to an mp3 player.

In this sense, it would be computing power vs. storage - and admittedly, both are growing fast enough to possibly make worrying about duplicates moot.