Author Topic: Consider Album Title Before Warning About Duplicates  (Read 1061 times)

mbuser23

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I've been using MusicBee for a while now, and am surprised that, when I'm making playlists, I still get duplicate warnings when only the artist and song title match. This is inconvenient when I'm adding live albums—or even just tracks from live albums—to playlists where another version of the song is already present. It also gets in the way of adding instances of older artists revisiting songs from the beginning of their career. I've already changed the setting about what tags to consider when managing duplicates, but that setting doesn't apply to adding tracks to a playlist, just the duplicate manager tool. Is there a rationale for not including album title in the fields that are considered when creating playlists? Or has anyone figured out a workaround/hack for this pain point?

frankz

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?

I'd say that the instances where an actual duplicate would have a different album name are pretty frequent.  Songs released on an album and then on a greatest hits album. Songs released as a single and then on an album.  Songs released on multiple multi-artist compilations.

The workarounds are to click yes to the dialog box, or turn off the warning, or use disambiguation ([Live], [Remix], [Rerecording]) in the title.

psychoadept

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I'm not sure why the selections in manage duplicates couldn't be applied to other duplicate detection (as long as it is clearly communicated somehow that that will happen).
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frankz

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IMO it's too permissive and will allow many duplicates and we'll be here explaining to people who are seeing duplicates in their playlists how to avoid the situation by setting it up exactly the way it's already set up now.

But whatever.

mbuser23

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I'm completely on board with @psychoadept. The rules I set for "manage duplicates" should apply to duplicate selection across the board. At the very least, the duplicate warning should give more context on the supposedly duplicate files, and allow either "select all" or selection on a case-by-case basis. There are, sure, some circumstances when I may not realize I'm adding a song to a playlist that was already on there, but if I'm adding a greatest hits album to a playlist (I don't really have very many of them, but I can see it as a possible scenario for other people), I'm not going to want to add the album piecemeal just because one song on it is also on another album I've added to the playlist.

mrbenn

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I agree that duplicate detection on playlists and imports can be overzealous in some cases and too permissive in others.

Examples:

"01 vs 1" track numbers - importing files to the inbox will *not* see these as the same (numerical) value so *not* flag as a dupe, assuming all other tags are the same.

"<Album> vs <Album> (some edition)" - when importing to the inbox, this would *not* be flagged as a dupe, again assumin all other tags are the same.

"<Song> - <Album>" vs "<Same Song> - <Compilation Album>" *does* get flagged as a duplicate in a playlist, regardless of any other tag.
 

Could you have per-area setting for what constitutes a duplicate, which you could change to what works for you?