Inconsequential ramblings

[taimatsu]

Silly question, mp3-related:

I've been ripping my CDs to the new computer now I've space for them. I have a number of compilation albums. Some songs appear on more than one in the same version. How do you handle this? I am torn, because I could just delete one, but then I lose the ability to easily play the whole of one album.

Thoughts?

Comments

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

I hated that problem. For me it depends on the album--if it's an album I really like listening to in its entirety, I rip it in its entirety; if the same track appears on more than one of these albums, I rip it twice. If it's an album I was always skipping about on, I only do the tracks I skipped.

There wasn't as much doubling as I feared, actually. Mostly things where songs on compliation albums I also had ripped from albums-by-the-artist.

[simont]

Currently I don't have enough duplicated tracks to worry about it, so I just rip the whole lot and leave the duplicated ones duplicated. If it became a severe problem I suppose I might have to re-think.

What are you using for playing the songs once you've ripped them, and how does its interface work? Some interfaces work by scanning the artist/album/track information stored in the track files themselves, but others work by having a separate system of playlists which simply give the names of some track files you might plausibly want to play in order. In the latter case, you could simply drop down to having one copy of the track, and two playlists that cited it in different contexts. The former type is more limiting in this respect, but unfortunately more common as well, presumably because it has the advantage that if you get pre-ID3ed music then it gets automatically organised for you without you having to set up playlists yourself.

[taimatsu]

I'm using amarok at present. I think it works by scanning the ID3 info. The problem is essentially... it's easiest to explain with an example, albeit a terribly gooshy one. I have Van Morrison's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' on a 'Troubadours' compilation and one called 'Love So Strong'. If I wanted to listen to just that song I would find it by using the search facility; but if I want to listen to the album I'd type the album name, and if I delete one it won't come up in both. I could create a playlist for each album, but that would get ridiculous and I'd have to do it manually.

[simont]

<f/x: downloads amarok and has a brief play>

Hmm, yes. So it looks as if amarok does both: uses ID3 information, but can also import .m3u playlist files. If it were me, in that case, I'd probably set up a script to automatically construct .m3us by scanning the ID3 tags. That'd get it mostly right, and then you could edit the results manually as necessary. So it might automatically construct a .m3u for Troubadours and one for Love So Strong, and then you could delete the copy of Brown-Eyed Girl on the latter and edit the .m3u so it pointed at the one in the former. Then tell amarok to rescan your music directory, and jobsagoodun. If you're lucky.

Actually writing the script would probably be a bit fiddly, but the good thing about it is that it only has to be done once. (And it is, I must admit, a standard geek trait to spend three hours writing a script to automatically do a one-hour job and still think you've made good use of time. Obviously you win if the same job then needs doing another three times and you still have the script; generally it doesn't, but we don't care :-)

[clupea-rufus.livejournal.com]

I tend to nuke the duplicates from the compilations, that way I still get whole albums (as in groups of songs originally designed to be heard in a certain order) grouped together. I don't tend to keep duplicates because it screws up things like smart playlists (having the same song twice in a playlist of thousands of songs isn't a big deal, but in smaller playlists it can be).

[taimatsu]

I use compilation albums for particular purposes - I mean, I have 'romantic comedy soundtracks' for a particular kind of soppy lurve music, and those covermount CDs from women's magazines for the kind of R'n'B stuff I don't usually listen to. So losing songs from those is annoying because I don't get the full spread of what's on that CD.

[james-r.livejournal.com]

I keep them both. Far easier.

[igniscience.livejournal.com]

i tend to just keep both.

unrelated aside: just saw this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2025604,00.html) on the old Reading chalk mines, hope your place is safe ?

[taimatsu]

Thanks for the heads-up about the mines! I live not far from the district involved - one road which is potentially affected leads off mine! But I am very close to the main road into town, and I imagine that is unlikely to be affected. Should be fine - though I may wander down Berkeley Avenue and see if I can see what's going on!

[taimatsu]

If you want to see where I am in relation to it, use Google Maps to look up 'Field Road' and 'Pell Street' in Reading. I live at the easternmost end of the latter.

[igniscience.livejournal.com]

yay - reassuring to know :)

[t-rrific.livejournal.com]

A suggestion that only works on OSX or Windoze (unfortunately) is iTunes. It lets you build playlists that function as albums. Therefore one track can be in many albums without duplicates.

If you're on Linux I'm guessing there should be something that'll do the trick - Banshee perhaps?

[lovingboth]

Linux will let you create links so that the same data is pointed to by two different file names...

[diffrentcolours]

That would save disk space but not prevent duplication within the player software, unless the software had been specifically written to consider this.