As I am re-ripping my entire CD collection, I have been avoiding greatest hits albums and compilations because I'm not sure how to handle duplicates--especially when I'm encoding in FLAC because I don't want to use any space I don't have to.
1. How do I search for duplicate files? I'm assuming there is excellent duplicate handling in Media Center because it does everything else perfectly.
2. How does Media Center determine if the Assorted folder should be used? I have an album called Lion King SE and they are not under the Assorted folder. Can't it just look for the same album name with different artists? I'm considering disabling the feature because if it doesn't work 100%, it isn't worth it.
3. Back to the duplicates issue...what do other people do? For example, I have a Now CD which contains a 3 Doors Down song called Kryptonite. I just found my 3 Doors Down CD called Better Life (I think) and it contains the same song (track 1). As much as I don't want to encode it again, I also don't like opening an album through Windows Explorer and missing a song. Perhaps it would be simplest and best to just encode the songs over and over--I have 3-4 copies of certain songs with Album, Greatest Hits 1, Greatest Hits 2, Special 3rd Party Compilation, for example.
Just looking for some input on the matters! Encoding is a long process! Last time I did it I was years younger and settled on 128Kb MP3. That worked fine up until now. I'm going from 128Kb MP3 to FLAC. I actually use 3 500GB hard drives (used, onsite backup, offsite backup) which leaves me 500GB and I have about 240GB free for music.
Another question: I seem to have collected music over the years either from Open Source sources or internet streams, etc., but I feel like I would contaminate my library if I add any low quality files. Does anyone know any good sources for high quality FLAC files on the internet--legal, free open source songs? There are some I have that I would like to attempt to get FLAC versions for.
Also, how can I determine what quality setting a FLAC file was encoded at 1-8? I always use the 8th setting just because it might save me an extra MB or two. I actually did a comparison on an album (I think Crash Test Dummies) and on quality 8, I got 302MB while quality 1 (I think it was 1, otherwise it might have been the default of 5 or 6) I got 305MB. Therefore, there is very little difference, but 2MB per album times 200 albums would be another album or two for free--just more processing power. The reason I want to check the quality is because I would like to re-encode FLAC files I get elsewhere to quality 8 and I would supposedly lose no quality at all--which is hard for me to believe after understanding the lossy disadvantages all these years.
I don't know why more people don't use the FLAC on computer and on-the-fly encoding to portable players, devices, etc.! It works so nicely! I always hate going to our theater room to listen to music and using low quality MP3's down there.
Does FLAC get changed very often? I noticed they are at version 1.6 or so and I'm curious if they make it better over time..smaller file size? It also seems to be very light on the decoding end. My computers stay at around 2%, on average, for decoding it, even on my slower machines.
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Topic: Compilations (Assorted folder) and duplicate handling?? (Read 847 times)