Now that I have a working iPod, it’s become more imperative that I do a little house-keeping with my iTunes library.
iTunes added a nice little feature a while back to search for duplicate songs. This helps a lot, but it’s not very accurate, especially since most of my mp3s have their title and album data pulled in from a CDDB somewhere, and many of the spellings are different – just enough to foul up the duplicate detector.
I’ve setup smart playlists that comprise my favorite songs that I’ve listened to less often than others. It works great for balancing out my music.
Last night, for unimportant reasons I was browsing my music sorted by play count and I noticed a number of songs that I just couldn’t possibly have listened to only once or twice in the years I’ve used iTunes.
This morning, on the way to work, my iPod played the same song twice in a row. As it happened I saw that it was actually duplicates from two different albums. I checked it out when I got home. In fact, I have this song from 3 different albums, and each had about 7 or 8 plays, putting them all in the least often played list. Together, I’ve listened to that particular song 22 times, which push it off the least played list.
What’s my choice? Delete 2 copies of it and get back the disk space and loss the play count for the two deleted copies. I also no longer have the entire “album†in my iTunes. If I browsed by album, it would be missing, and, should I want to listen to that particular album, I wouldn’t even know which song was missing.
That’s not so good.
Solution? Here’s an idea – get Apple to add secondary album and track information to their extended metadata.
In that scenario, I can keep the track from the original album (In this case Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights) and delete the ones from Solid Brass and A&M Classics Vol 1, but add the album and track info from the deleted copies to the one remaining file. This way if I browse by one of the compilation albums I’ll still see and play all the tracks, but I won’t be wasting the disk space and my play counts will be more accurate.
Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, iPod, iTunes, Music, Software, Technology