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[cfgreen]

Having a large music collection has only been possible due to your software!
Try having a library of a few thousand songs with the Data Base in the other company’s product. (Musicmatch)

As an Album collector, could there be a way to create a Virtual Album using the music existing in the library?

1) Hopefully to cut down some redundancy on file storage (baring remixes and remastered etc.)
2) To increase my album selection

Let me try to clarify,

All music is stored by artist \ album with the album cover as well. 33,000 +  files spanning two 120G drives split 0-J and K-Z.
Now the Various Artists is rather a large folder and let’s use the many disk Rolling Stone collection. As I track down that I have the song on the original album a way to point or shortcut that can be read by MC to play it from the other dir. Hence the storage savings.


Thanks!

[Matt]

Could you use playlists / playlist groups?

[V-Man]

What do you mean by 'virtual album'? Can you not just create playlists?

[V-Man]

Dammit Matt, you beat me by TWO MINUTES!  

[rocketsauce]

As suggested, playlists are one way.

Another way that I've been playing around with is I created a new custom, semicolon delimited field called Alt. Album. So, in the same way that one track can be added to multiple playlists, I can add multiple "virtual album" titles in that field. Then I can use Alt. Album as a keyword to build View Schemes.

The advantage of using playlists over View Schemes is that you can control the sequence of the tracks.

Rob

[DougHamm]

I see your point; I have my own take on it.

I have lots of full albums, but I also have some compilation albums (best of's, anthologies, etc.).  By that I mean store-bought, not my own compilations or playlists.  I find it a waste to have duplicate songs, but yet I don't want to delete duplicates from either the original album, or the compilation album.

It'd be nice to be able to replace a song with a shortcut (or virtual song as you called it) pointing to an original that's stored under some other album, though I've never seen a program that allows for this.  Another way to do it would be to allow for choosing multiple Albums in a file's properties, so that the same file shows up in more than one place.  That wouldn't work within the confines of ID3 tagging but perhaps Mediacenter's database is powerful enough to do it.

[Wobbley]

I think this is what this guy is getting at:

Let's say I have the Rolling Stones boxset, which has most or all of their songs.  Invariably, the boxset will contain all of the songs on the "Sticky Fingers" album, but I don't actually own the "Sticky Fingers" album, I own the boxset.  I think this guy wants to be able to "create" a "Sticky Fingers" album in Media Center by somehow tagging the actual files on the Rolling Stones boxset so that a virtual album "Sticky Fingers" shows up in Media Center, but all of the track listings on this virtual album actually point to the actual files from the boxset, making it appear that he actaully has the "Sticky Fingers" album.

Wobbley

[NoCodeUK]

And that would be absolutely Awesome!!
It would also be totally unique and could be a major selling point.  Certainly one MS hasn't thought of yet...MC takes the lead again

Adam

[KingSparta]

Having a large music collection has only been possible due to your software!

It grows on you.


'Digital Display' Charted At 21 In 1985

Listening to: 'Digital Display' from 'The Best Of Ready For The World' by 'Ready For The World' on Media Center 9.1

[mawiffen]

It's not perfect, but what I've started trying is replacing the 'Filename' tag in the properties of the two duplicate songs to point to the same physical file.  This way the MC database thinks there are two songs, even though there is only one file.  What you have to do is rename/delete the file you don't want (otherwise if MC can still see it, it tries to overwrite the other file when you change the filename), go into properties, and under the 'File Info' subset of 'File Info', there's a field for 'Filename'.  Pretty straightforward.

The main problems with this that I can see right now are that if you update the tags from the library, it'll update the tag twice with different information.  And if you use the update library from tags function, it'll screw up one of the library entries.  Just in case, I've backed up my library.

[ChrisRainman]

It's not perfect, but what I've started trying is replacing the 'Filename' tag in the properties of the two duplicate songs to point to the same physical file.  This way the MC database thinks there are two songs, even though there is only one file.  What you have to do is rename/delete the file you don't want (otherwise if MC can still see it, it tries to overwrite the other file when you change the filename), go into properties, and under the 'File Info' subset of 'File Info', there's a field for 'Filename'.  Pretty straightforward.

The main problems with this that I can see right now are that if you update the tags from the library, it'll update the tag twice with different information.  And if you use the update library from tags function, it'll screw up one of the library entries.  Just in case, I've backed up my library.

Very good idea, but not good enough for longterm organization. As you said after an update my work will become destroyed. Second it would take a long time to manually edit all these file location tags.

MC should have a function that allows users to mark records as logical entries which are linked to one "master entry" that is really linked with a physical file. By relating to this master record the old file automatically should be deleted (as an option).

How about that?

[kiwi]

Edit: Please disreguard, this of course won't work as the tags will be the same.  Thanks for pointing that out.  my bad.

What about using one of those programs that lets you create symlinks... and hard links.  

Sure it takes a bit of work, but then you truely have exact copies of the songs.  And any program can use them.

here's one page I found:
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=131

The other side of things is that HDs are cheap, just get another.

kiwi

[jlee]

The problem with having virtual tracks (to use the example from a previous message this would be a track that looks like it comes from 'Sticky Fingers' when it actually comes from the Stones Box Set) is that it would be dependent on the info in your library rather than on the tag of the actual file.

I have around 20K tracks and all are very carefully tagged.  I don't have to back up my library 'cos I back up all the actual tracks instead (to another HDD).  Then if I re-install the software, lose the library, or try another company's software all the tags are intact.  

With virtual files, though a fantastic idea, these would be lost if the library were lost e.g. if I had 20K real files but 23K files including 3K virtual files then a refresh of the library from the contents of the HDD would add only 20K tracks.

Tagging would be a problem too 'cos I set MC to always update the tags on the files themselves, thereby removing my reliance on the MC library.

What I'm saying is that if MC do develop this idea further, then I'd like the virtual track to actually create a special file on the HDD that contains all the ID3 tag info of the virtual track (including the file location of the real track).  This file would be very small in comparison to an MP3 but would remove the reliance on the library file for tag info.

Maybe MC could then patent the idea and allow other software developers to support virtual files which, as they are files in their own right, could be imported into the libraries of other programs.

What do you think?
:-/