I will appreciate any consideration you can give to a suggestion for enhancement of MC-9. First, I am presently using build 9.0.129. I consider MC-9 to be a stunning achievement, some of the finest software available today.
My suggestion is that you add an option to automatically bypass duplicate song names when playing all tracks on the library for a particular artist.
I have 13,000 audio files on my media library. Most of these were ripped from my collection of 1,500 CD’s, an open task with lots more to be ripped. A large number of the songs appear on single artist CD’s and also are on compilations, like '* Hitsville USA - The Motown Singles - Vol 1'. I make sure that I rip and import every track, thus providing proper playback of the entire album, and as a byproduct I have a backup of the store-bought disc. This causes problems when playing all of the songs by a particular artist. For example, I would get Elvis’ 'Hound Dog' about a dozen times.
At present, this problem can be overcome by encoding all but one of the 'Hound Dog' tracks with some file property indicating that it is a duplicate, then filtering them out. This is effective, but it requires lots of work. Then, unless filtering is turned off, it messes up playback of the single albums containing the duplicate.
It would be nice to have MC-9 sense that additions to the 'playing now' list cause it to contain more than one version of the exact same [song name and artist], and then alerting the user of the circumstance, allowing him/her to choose how to handle the duplicates.
A related problem is the amount of hard disc space needed for a dozen duplicate 'Hound Dog' tracks. I don’t feel that MC-9 needs to be concerned with this problem, but I’ve experimented with HARD LINKS, a little known feature of Windows XP, applicable to a single NTFS volume. This allows you to have one physical file, with multiple file names. I’d be interested in knowing what others have encountered with this technology, especially as it may impact MC-9.
Keep up the fantastic work! You have a world-class product, and your competitors should be standing in total awe of MC-9.