Sorry, but I don't like your idea of tagging songs (1 star). I'm not a fan of quick fixes like that.
Why don't you just create a new field to manage this [exclude]?
Honestly, this isn't a big enough concern for me to bother with a whole field. In general I try to avoid Best-Of CD's as I don't feel like they're a good representation of an artist's work. If I do have a best of as a source I'll often go so far as to re-tag the whole thing with all the songs from their original albums. I can always put them back together in just as cohesive a fashion as they were assembled for the best-of release. So...this leaves me mostly with soundtracks producing duplicates and I don't have a ton of those lying around either...my half-arssed solution works well enough for me.
Why would you care about a few duplicates? The cost of storage is almost zero.
I would assume (
hope maybe?) that disc space isn't the issue at this juncture in time. For me it's really about little things like having an "accurate" number of plays count for tracks, not having to pay special attention and use special tricks to avoid having duplicate songs in a playlist or other such circumstances. So, as I mentioned above, it's not a huge deal
for me but for those who are very completist about certain artists I could see why this would become more of a hang-up.
To take the current discussion a step further, one of the things that comes to mind with the whole "virtual album" idea (especially within MC) is the idea of converting playlists into "virtual albums". I've always liked the idea of being able to combine my playlists in with my albums in a view scheme (adding cover art to a playlist and making it look just like a "real" album). For me this would be one of the more interesting/fun uses for a "virtual album" feature. When you get down to it, that's pretty much what a playlist is at this point, except that you can't assign attributes or metadata to the playlist as its own entity. Functionally speaking though, the playlist is beginning to replace the album (for them youngsters). It's becoming increasingly common for artists to only release singles and then let their fans combine the songs as they see fit into whatever list of songs they like. So, to me, morphing the playlist into something that is similar, functionally, to an album makes sense in the scope of modern audible media.
So, if a static playlist were to change over to a "virtual album" (which conceptually isn't a huge leap) it could certainly also cover the duplicate songs on multiple albums dilemma. There could be one "main album" or just "album" (oh my!) with additional virtual albums for things like best-of's, soundtracks or playlists. This is what I was daydreaming about on my way home today anyway... I live an important life
.
-JB