The same song in different albums

2017-11-02 12:55:10

Hello dear forum users!
I got different albums contained with some similar songs.

But I'd like to have only one physical copy of each song. Is there a way to achive the subject?

Thank you in advance.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #1 – 2017-11-03 00:36:38

Yikes, destroying albums? Well it is your collection

There are many "fingerprinting" duplicate finders around. I do have my opinions about them. But you need to clarify what you mean by the "same song". For example, what about different recordings? If you have a live version and a studio version, are they the same to you? If yes, then you could often do with a tag-based search.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #2 – 2017-11-03 09:40:56

Thanks for answer. Some clarifyings. I have a lot of compillation albums (for example Cafe del Mar) where periodic you can see songs from previous compilation. And if they are not absolutelly itentical (with fingerprints) but they look like so. One song version is quite enough.

And the main question is how to tell foobar's Media Library to see one file copy in a few albums?

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #3 – 2017-11-03 11:04:46

That's an interesting question. I *think* as long as you are using mp3 files with ID3 v2.4 tags, or FLACs, you could theoretically define multiple album fields in the music tags. I don't use foobar's library, but at least on my MinimServer setup, the "album artist" field cannot be duplicated, so I imagine all the albums listed would have to have the same album artist. I'm not sure how you'd handle track number. Nor am I sure what music players would display if they found multiple album title fields. I think you'd be asking for trouble trying to do this with tags.

Maybe the foobar library will let you sort by folder structure? Then maybe you could have shortcuts in multiple folders to one file. You'd want to display file names instead of tags, but I know it can do that because I had it set up that way back before I populated my tags. But I don't know if foobar will recognize shortcuts. Not sure if any of this helps.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #4 – 2017-11-03 12:40:22

This sounds like a reason to use symbolic links!

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #5 – 2017-11-03 19:18:37

Thanks for replies!
It is interesting about multiple album title tag, but I'm not sure if foobar can figures it out.

And yes, I have already tried to use shortcuts (symbolic links) in pair with foo_lnk (foobar shell link resolver). Unfortunatelly it works only with drag-n-drop, but Album List with view by folder structure still ignores *.lnk. By the way hard links are not acceptable due to binding to the specific file system.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #6 – 2017-11-03 19:40:52

Bad idea, even same album have different sounding versions of the songs (US vs German, 1st 80s edition vs 2000s reeditions, etc).  When you substitute a given song from an album it will probably have a different volume level/ DR compression than the rest of the album.  Unless you listen to the songs randomly it will usually change volume/eq album flow, and it's quite bothering.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #7 – 2017-11-21 00:09:04

not every track is worth keeping in 5 or so slightly different versions. as long as they have replaygain it should not be a problem.

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #8 – 2017-11-21 15:13:07

Maybe try foo_bestversion...

Re: The same song in different albums

Reply #9 – 2019-10-03 01:12:58

For the present I found the following workaround. You can use mklink - a Windows cmd builtin tool to make SOFT LINKS. So in contrast to shortcuts soft links are visible in foobar media library searching and listing.