Add Multiple versions of an album, but only one mp3 tracks to MB

[Markus2310]

Hey.
I hope I can describe my problem in a way that everyone understands.

I have several versions of some albums here. For example, the covers differ, but the songs themselves are the same.
At the moment I copied the folder of the album and then added the information to the songs of the copy. For example: “The Masterpieces (Russian Edition) “ + the different Cover+cd scan.
This takes up a lot of hard disk space in the long run. Is there a way to assign multiple information to the same mp3 or flac files, so that they are displayed separately, like it's now (see Screenshot)?

[Zak]

Hi.

Regardless of what tags or settings you use, in any given view MusicBee will display a track once, and once only.
So sadly, the answer to Is there a way to assign multiple information to the same mp3 or flac files, so that they are displayed separately is no.

The only currently available workaround is to keep one main copy of each album, and create the other album versions using ASX files that point to the original files, but have their own tag values.
MusicBee's support for ASX files can be sketchy, and creating and maintaining them is painful, so before you decide to do that I'd strongly recommend asking yourself whether it's worth the time for what seems a pretty niche use case. (If the tracks are all exactly the same, why do you want to show different album versions? Some albums have dozens of different releases.   )

It looks like old forum threads on the use of ASX files have been purged - the search results don't show some very early discussions - but this thread shows the idea:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=24465.msg141184

There have been various requests over the years for the ability to create "virtual albums" to address cases like this (but specifically for compilation albums), but none have had gained much momentum.

[Markus2310]

Hi Zak!

Thank you very much for the link. The Duplicates Manager seems like something I can use. I will first play with it with a copy of my data.

I just add there the CDs i own physically. And I'm not own every CD when its just has a Logo, or not a logo, on the back. But for different covers, booklets ect...
I think that duplicate manager works only for music files, not Video (mp4), right?