How to handle: same song on different albums

[ericvschultz]

Hi all

Let's say I have the same song on three different albums: the original release by the artist, a subsequent "greatest hits" by that artist, and a later "compliation album" that includes the song. As we sometimes just select an album to listen to, I don't want to lose the song from any of the albums.

Is there any way to tag ONE copy of the song as belonging to three different albums? Right now, the only solution I can think of is to have three copies of the song on the hard drive, which seems inefficient from a storage point of view.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts
Eric

[MoDementia]

Just so I know when I look at duplicates tree node, I have set the rating to "bomb" on 2 of the three songs (lesser quality) with a comment in one of the custom tags as to why it is a bomb

Then at least I can filter out getting all three in an auto playlist by excluding "bombs" and or custom like "duplicate..."

[pah68]

I keep all my duplicates, (unless they are stand alone single tracks). Storage is cheap nowadays.

[rovingcowboy]

the only duplicates i keep are of hiriam hank songs and of Elvis Presly songs.

the way i see it if your going to have dupi's then why not only keep the best.

[Lowlander]

Currently you can't associate one track to multiple albums. The good news is that multiple values for a tag might be added to MediaMonkey in the next release. This might allow you to associated a song to multiple albums.

As harddrive space is not an issue nowadays (both cheap and available in external flavors) most people (me included) choose to keep all versions. Often the same track from different album is slightly different as well.

[Scooter]

If using a mask of <Artist> - <Title>, MM will tell you that there is a duplicate and will ask you if you want to replace it in the rip stage.

If using other masks, like <Artist>\<Album>\ File Name, MM will not pick up the duplicates in the ripping stage. You must weed those out yourself.

Me, I keep the duplicates. Sometimes I want to listen to the Bee Gees Greatest Hits, and sometimes Saturday Night Fever. Why get rid of either?

[wishmechaos]

Though storage is cheap nowadays, I hate redundancy. My method isn't the best, but it works: I delete all but one version of the song, and build a playlist of the other albums which contain it, pointing to their own files, and the files found in other folders.

That way I can have a 'best of' CD, even if I have the complete discography of an artist, without redundancy.

greetings!

[pah68]

I'd hate to do that with a large collection (2000+ albums)
As Lowlander pointed out, often versions of the same song are slightly different across different albums, apart from the obvious Live v's Studio versions.

I like to keep albums in their entirety, it's an anal thing. In some cases which I do realise is ridiculous, I have the orginal version of an album and the remastered version of it.

But each to their own. I'm still searching for a seemless way of maintaining the playcount of my favourite tracks, across the duplicates, without deleting those duplicates.

[rovingcowboy]

how about

search for duplicates to current song.
if true then add 1 playcount to duplicate song's played history count.

would making a script like that work? it looks good to this none scripter?

[pah68]

Might work but...the current Find Dups scripts don't work for me.