Customize Duplicate Handling in Auto Playlists

[HerrMerkt]

I really appreciate MusicBee as a great way to manage my music collection.

Currently, I am trying to configure my auto playlists and I was wondering whether there is a possibility to change the way that duplicates are handled when ticking the "filter out duplicates..." box in the auto playlist settings. What I am trying to do is keeping the versions of the tracks that were added earlier (e.g. because they were released as singles) and filter out the newer versions (e.g. that are now part of a full album).

Obviously, the default settings in MusicBee either seem to favor newer tracks or the tracks that are included in a full album. However, this is not what I need for my "Discover" auto-playlist in that I want to avoid having tracks that I already know because they were released as singles. Does anyone have a solution for this?

[HerrMerkt]

This will not help because I want to keep the singles and remove the duplicate tracks included in the albums. The "filter out duplicate..." option efficiently removes all the singles, but keeps the album tracks. However, I want to keep the singles.

[frankz]

Yes, I had it backward in my initial post and deleted it.  The crux of the advice is the same, though.

You will need to tag tracks of the type you do not want included in some way and then include a criterion in your auto-playlist that filters out tracks with that tag.  

MusicBee will do what you tell it to, but you need to give it the information it needs to do it.

[HerrMerkt]

Of course, I could manually tag all the album tracks that I want to remove. However, I do not want to remove all the album tracks, but only the tracks that were previously released as singles.  I want to automatize this process. Because MusicBee efficiently removes duplicates; however, the wrong ones, I was wondering whether one could change the automatic duplicate handling settings.
To repeat: I would like to know whether I am able to tell MusicBee to remove the newer versions in the duplicate pairs instead of the older versions.

Thank you anyway for your help.

[Pingaware]

No, MB can't (to the best of my knowledge) be asked to differentiate between the duplicates based on a criteria - I don't know what the criteria are for it choosing. Steven may be able to elaborate.

I guess the way I would go about this would be to populate Original Album for all tracks with the original release it was on. Then, you could just set an additional rule for Original Album = Album and the singles would be picked automatically over the album tracks. You could even fudge it by only defining Original Album for tracks that were on a different release to the one they are tagged with currently, then create a virtual tag to define Original Album (Virtual) as something like (not using the syntax because I can't be bothered right now) : If Original Album has a value use that, else use Album.

In general, for more complex things involving the specifics of different releases, tags are the way to go with MB. The inbuilt functions like duplicate removal are good basic steps but aren't designed to be used for complicated criteria (and this is complicated in tagging terms, as simple as it may seem).

[Freddy Barker]

This may be of use!

Some of us use the GROUPING tag to differentiate between all the various issues of the same track, see here...

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=23536.msg137304#msg137304

You need to be a little organisationally OCD, but the method works fine. Depends of course how large your library is, as to how long it could take to implement!

So basically, for any track that has more than one version, you can enter Single, LP, EP, 7 inch, Acoustic, Remix, DJ Whatsit Remix, Dub-Step, Trance, Remastered, New Vocal, etc. into the Grouping tag, which has 50 spaces available for info..