Hi,
Does anyone know if its possible to have a library player (MusicBee, Media Monkey iTunes etc) only keep one version of a song but still list it in all albums?
I have 20 versions of the same track and it takes up space, and this track is available on 20 different albums.
Is it possible to play the track from any of the 20 Albums but only have one copy?
regards
Beanie
You speak about symbolic links created under Windows with the internal command
mklink ?
Or just Shortcuts, created under Windows by a right mouse-click and "Create Shortcut"?
I don't see how that's supposed to work. Even if you create links in each of the albums, the tags of the song will still only reflect one album. It's also very prone to errors (if you decide to change your directory structure for example) and honestly I don't think it's worth the hassle. Even 20 flac tracks usually take up sub 500MB. In a time of 20TB hdds that's negligible imho. Also you'd have to be absolutely sure that the track is identical and not a different master etc..
This would also break useful features like replaygain (at least the album gain) etc..
Probably one of the cases where this could work is the use of Single/Album-Chart compilations.
Something like "UK Top 40 Charts from 2024-06-20" or "German Top 100 from 2024-06-22".
But even there I would like to see if Eminem's Houdini is on position 3 or 10 (as TRACK number).
And the charts themselves also have a weekly or monthly date (in the ALBUM name).
This may only work if you ignore all metadata except the TITLE and the ARTIST.
I totally agree.
Wouldn't a playlist come close to it?
The problem of
would stay the same, though.
And I agree with @LyricsLover and @Casual_Tea
The maintenance of such links would take a much higher effort than to simply take each album as it is. And it would have to be repeated for every new set of files.
One additional thing I just thought of:
If your primary goal is to reduce the "wasted" space through duplicates you might want to look into file systems that offer deduplication (zfs for example). If the audio part of the tracks is really identical, it would only be stored once, even if it is present on 20 albums. However deduplication usually takes up a lot of resources in terms of RAM and also has a slight CPU penalty. You'd have to decide if the space savings are worth those drawbacks.
Only if you never change your file structure.
Otherwise the idea of "Shortcuts" (but not symbol links!) would be helpful.
"Shortcuts" would automatically adjust their path to a moved song.
Thanks for your inputs