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[hit_ny]

People have asked for this concept for a long time or a way to reduce on repetitive tracks taking up more space than necessary.

I was thinking the solutin to this might be to allow MC to understand the concept of Windows shortcuts.

If one wanted to create a virtual track, MC would allow to create a shortcut to point to the actual track that a user designates.

The shortucuts/virtual tracks could be displayed using a slightly different icon so its apparent,  its a link.  Burning an album that contained these links would be transparent to a user.

If the user decides to move directories around using the tree, MC updates the shortcuts so they still point to the right file or vice versa if the file location pointed to by the shortcut changes.

Hows that !!

[sraymond]

JRiver:  What does the database schema look like?  Is is a lot of work to present the relations to the user?  It sure would be nice to associate album-like metadata with an album object instead of a track object.

Scott-

[phelt]

I'm not opposed to this at all - it would be useful to me. But it does read as a geek/uberuser feature, so I'm a little doubtful about it getting implemented.

One use-case issue: what does MC do when you perform a delete on a shortcut?

[hit_ny]

One use-case issue: what does MC do when you perform a delete on a shortcut?

If the delete was performed in MC using My Computer tree, then is it reasonable to expect that only that virtual track is delted. However if the track that the shortcuts point to is deleted then i'd expect a warning window to come up showing dependencies, if any.

If a delete is performed in windows explorer instead of MC, then MC shows the tracks with a red cross, like currently. If its a file pointed to by others then similar behavior displaying it missing whereever a shortcut uses it.

[V-Man]

I for one can't quite see the point. I would think it's easier just to have more than one copy of the file for each actual ripped CD, and to use playlists to make completely new collections of music. The amount of disc space used up by duplicate copies must be proportionately very small.

The ideas here just sound over-complicated.

[hit_ny]

The amount of disc space used up by duplicate copies must be proportionately very small.

How many gigs does the smartlist "show duplicates" give for your library ?

[LisaRCT]

I'm not opposed to this at all - it would be useful to me. But it does read as a geek/uberuser feature, so I'm a little doubtful about it getting implemented.

One use-case issue: what does MC do when you perform a delete on a shortcut?

It should be seemless to the user if properly implimented.

The amount of disc space used up by duplicate copies must be proportionately very small.

How many gigs does the smartlist "show duplicates" give for your library ?

At least 10%  in my case . . .  my larger libraries are worse.

[jleerigby]

At least 10%  in my case . . .  my larger libraries are worse.

That's about $10 worth then?  Does it really metter that much.  If you're serious about music just buy a raid controller (or a mobo with Raid) and keep adding hard drives as they fill up - They're cheap enough.  I've stopped worrying about duplicates that much (within reason - i.e. I wouldn't normally rip a compliation album if I had all the tracks anyway) as it's so easy just to implement a big HDD and that keeps me going for ages.

One thing I have done when people have asked if I've got a popular compilation album that I haven't bothered to rip is to just create a playlist for it.  You could create a playlist group called Virtual Albums.  Not as powerful I know but it does the job nicely.

[crowfan]

Personally, I would find this very useful.

Right now, I do what JLee does: I create a playlist called "[Artist]'s Greatest Hits" and I just drag and drop the songs from the original albums. The nice thing about this is that it still shows the original albums when you're looking at the playlist.

But I have to switch from my panes to the tree in order to see the Greatest Hits album. Ideally it would show up in the list of albums under the appropriate artist.

crow

[zeltak]

i would really find something like the shortcut system or virtual album very usefull since HD are not that cheap yet where i live in and i have loads of boxed sets i once bought (zepplin,yes clapton etc...) and i would love an option to use these as original albums showing in my normal artist-album view in media library

Zeltak