Too Many DJ’s (and solo artists, bands and anything else really…)
What is the best way to organise your music collection?!
I’ve been looking at my collection recently and i have TONS of duplicate songs. I use iTunes to organise my music, and this has never been a problem, but I recon i could save myself a fair amount of space if i could just remove a number of the duplicates. All very well… BUT WAIT! There is a problem. What happens when you want to play the soundtrack from School Of Rock, but you no longer have Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in there, because you already have to complete albums collection of the Zep? This for me is a problem. I want to be able to have my cake and eat it. I want one copy of the file, but the ability to have it recognised as part of multiple albums/track numbers etc.
Oh but wait – i want more. I also want all of this to be automated when I import one of my cd’s. I don’t want to have to go through my collection song by song and add this information…
Ah, dreams – where’s that star when i need it…
Am I alone in this? Anyone else crying out for help sorting their music collection? Is there already a solution for this that I dont know about?! (please say yes). Who knows… maybe I’ve just lost it…. ciao for now…
March 16th, 2007 at 00:13
It requires hours and hours of patient IDtag editing and sorting until late in the night-I should know! If you find this miracle-program please tell me!
March 16th, 2007 at 09:03
Yeah, but even with that, iTunes cant recognise something as being from two different albums can it?
March 16th, 2007 at 09:43
I’m sure anyone who builds up a decent sized collection at any point will have this problem.
The way that Apple want you to handle it in iTunes would be to use playlists. For instance with School of Rock you point to your Zeppelin track then to your ACDC track until you have built up the album so you don’t have dupes.
Clearly this is shit though cause you want it listed as an album. The only way I can think of doing this would be to use a symbolic link but I have never tried it. You basically create the folder for the album and create symbolic links to each file you need. That way when iTunes looks for the file it hits the link and plays the original. The main problem I can see with this though is probably the meta data which would be shared between both albums. Would be nice if you could override some of that in the symbolic link.
iTunes ain’t great for this sort of thing.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:04
I looked at symbolic links or NTFS hard links, but there are two probs – 1) You cant do this on a removable HDD (which is where my music is stored) and 2) you’d only have the track info for one of the files (creating the same problem in iTunes anyway).
)
Problem with the playlist option you mention is that if you are searching, it would only find the track if you put in the LZ album as opposed to the School of Rock option.
Do you know of a better program that will help with this sort of stuff? I dont mind ditchin iTunes as i find it a bit clunky anyway (although i’d still need to keep it for my iPod
March 16th, 2007 at 10:43
Symbolic links in Vista or Linux work much better than the XP ones and I see no reason why they wouldn’t work with removable storage. Of course that doesn’t fix the meta data issue as you mention.
I have been looking for alternatives for sometime now. I think the best contenders are Amarok and Songbird but you can’t use neither right now. Songbird is too unstable and Amarok is KDE only. Luckily Songbird is getting close to version 1 and the Amarok team are working on the KDE4 version which as a side effect will be Windows compatible.
Amarok is the best iTunes like media player out there with hook ins to all sorts of different web apps and a ton of plugins. And best of all it’s iPod compatible. It’s just a waiting game.
March 16th, 2007 at 16:31
Ah cool – sounds like that may be worth the wait then. I love the way you put windows as a ‘side-effect’ lol.
In the meantime, i guess i’ll stick with all the duplicates…
March 16th, 2007 at 17:40
If I understand you right, the only reason you want to remove duplicates is to save space – is space really that much of a problem for you? Surely you can’t have so many duplicates that you’re talking serious gigabytes here?
Out of curiosity, I’ve just put the filter on iTunes I have 539 “duplicate” tracks taking up a total of 3.27 GB so maybe that validates your point somewhat. However, before you take that as a retraction of my above statement, consider that this will only save ~1.6GB if I were to get rid of all the songs with the same title and artist. Further, many of these “duplicates” are actually not the same, given that many are simply live versions in addition to the studio recording. Stripping out only those that are actually identical (or near enough) wouldn’t save me much at all.
Then again, I have very few compilation-type records and tend to stick to full studio albums – you probably have more compilations/film soundtracks and I’m sure you have more outright music than me anyway.
But I still come back to my first point – even if we are talking a few gigabytes I don’t see how that is an issue in the slightest given hard drive sizes and the low cost of additional storage. For me, it’s far more important that I listen to my music in albums – I much prefer this to shuffling on a track by track basis.
March 16th, 2007 at 18:06
I’m looking at about a gig-gig and a half, which i know isnt much, but its still space that i’d rather not be using, and in this day and age, shouldnt really need to!
March 17th, 2007 at 18:32
It is literally a side effect that a windows version of Amarok will be available. Amarok was never planned to be for Windows but because of the move to the new version of QT it gives them the option along with a load of other KDE apps to port over quickly.
March 17th, 2007 at 18:55
Oh right, i see – thought you were being facetious
March 19th, 2007 at 18:01
Are you serious? What’s 1GB these days? Stop worrying about it… storage is cheap, and having duplicates ISN’T messy, it’s normal.
March 19th, 2007 at 18:11
I do have a habbit of worrying about things that really shouldnt worry me!
Out of interest Tim, where did you come across my site from? Just looked at your site, will check back in the future as i have a desire to build my own mame cabinet at some point too!
March 19th, 2007 at 18:16
I used to live with Griffin, so through his blog.
BTW, you’re sat next to me for UFC
March 19th, 2007 at 18:25
Ah right – thats you is it!
Can’t wait for that, gonna be ace!
Good work