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 Eliminating Library Duplicates

iTunes Tips
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You probably have duplicate songs in your library. This often occurs when you have an album but also a single related to it, or a song also appears on a compilation.

Why is this bad? Firstly, they take up space. Secondly, because the same song exists as two or more separate files, they are treated as entirely different songs. Playcounts are separately kept. I find this, plus the multiple files, confusing.

Here's my handling:

I consider the album senior to singles and compilations.

If I own an album and a related single, I rip the album in its entirety, then all songs from the single minus duplicates. If I own a single only, I rip all songs. If I then buy the album, I retag the duplicate song from the single as the one from the album. I do this to preserve the playcount and rating.

I have a set of compilations, many songs of which I also own on albums. After deleting the compilation duplicates, I had removed so many that the compilation structure was gone. I resolved this by setting up playlists for each of the 48 CDs and then adding all the songs that belong on them. Now I can play one of these compilation CDs and get all the songs in the correct order. I recommend this if you have a number of compilations as above.

You can save a lot of space by doing the above. I have asked Apple to implement a better solution: aliases. I want to be able to create an alias of a song and tag it independently of the original. That way, I could have the original "Song X" ripped from the album "Album X", then create an alias of it for "Single X". The alias would have different album, track and disc number and album art tags, but would have the same playcount, rating and date played. No matter if I played the song from the album or the single, this data would remain constant, which makes sense, as it's the same song.


by japester on Feb 03 | 7:00 am
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 iTunes 4: About the iPod Selection Playlist

iTunes Tips
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Apple has posted an article about the iPod Selection Playlist. I found this fascinating, since I've never even seen the dialog before. It seems that it is a standard playlist created by iTunes when the library will not fit on the iPod. It clearly is using some smart playlist-type criteria to build the selection, but the final result is a static list.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93656


by dfbills on Jan 31 | 6:27 pm
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 Aesthetic Punctuation

iTunes Tips
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Did you know that your iPod can display special characters such as foreign letters and "smart" or "curly" quotes? I don't know how to do this on a Wintel, but on a Mac, it's easy. Use key combinations such as shift-option-] for the most common one, a curly apostrophe for use in words such as "I'm". You can activate the input menu using the International system preference and then you can select "Show Character Palette..." from it. From here, you can see all possible characters.

You can update your library simply by searching for punctuation like the apostrophe ', which will show you all the songs, albums and artists you need to update.

It's a fiddly and somewhat perfectionist thing, but I think special characters just look great on the iPod screen.


by japester on Jan 31 | 9:53 am
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 Getting the Most out of Classical Music with iTunes and the iPod

iTunes Tips
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MacBlog.com has posted an article: Getting the Most out of Classical Music with iTunes and the iPod.

http://www.macblog.com/comments.php?id=146_0_1_0_C


by dfbills on Jan 30 | 8:00 am
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 Administrative Playlists

iTunes Tips
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I have a number of playlists that I use strictly for administrative purposes, such as presenting all unrated songs for rating, songs tagged as temporary, etc. To distinguish between these and playlists used to find music for playing, I put a bullet (option-8) and a space in front of the playlist name. In this way, the administrative playlists get grouped at the beginning of the list of sources in iTunes and playlists on the iPod. It's easy to distinguish between playlist types in this way.

by japester on Jan 28 | 6:59 am
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