Stupid iTunes question

[tahnan]

So iTunes thinks I have a lot of "duplicate music". That's because iTunes is stupid, and doesn't realize that a live album will have a different version of a song; the four-minute difference in length is a good indication of that.

But some of the music really is duplicated. For instance, I have "We Walk" by R.E.M. on their album "Murmur", and also on "Mary Had a Little Amp". It seems to me that I don't really need to keep two files around when I could keep one. But! If I delete, say, the one from "Murmur", then when I tell iTunes, "Play me everything from Murmur", it'll miss a song.

Is there any way to convince iTunes to file a song twice based on a single file?

Comments

[fuldu.livejournal.com]

Based entirely on knowledge of how Apple does things and not at all on iTunes:

Can you create an alias of the single file to call, say, the Murmur file? It'll still be two files, but one would be of negligible size.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no. For one thing, I think the album info is stored in the file itself, not within iTunes; so you wouldn't be able to change the album of the alias. For another, as far as I can tell, when you import an alias, it goes and gets the actual file instead of pointing to the alias.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

I habitually make playlists of individual albums. When I have a legitimate duplicate like that, I put the first copy in the other playlist. Any time I want to listen to an album, I play the appropriate playlist. This doesn't produce the desired results when listening to the iTunes library on shuffle by album, but you can't have everything.

I suspect that creating playlists for individual albums is excessively obsessive behavior on my part, but excessive obsession probably generally describes my approach to iTunes.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

Another idea is to send Apple feedback through the iTunes music store, suggesting they incorporate that functionality in the next version of iTunes. If enough people do that, or if it's a good enough idea, maybe they'll implement it down the line.

Hey, I said another idea, not a good idea.