Bugzilla – Bug 12177
tracks in multiple formats are indistinguishable in album view
Last modified: 2009-07-06 12:22:22 UTC
I'm not sure if I choose the right component, but the basic problem is this: My music directory has two branches, one is for mp3s, and the other is for flac. I prefer to listen to the flac files, but I rip everything as an mp3 as well so I can put them on my ipod. Because the tags match, both versions of each track on an album will show up in that album view, which makes adding the album difficult. Manually adding the tracks is also difficult because it's not clear what the format is for each track listen unless you view the information for it first. One solution would be to separate the albums based on the format, so instead of seeing the albums Foo and Bar in the list, I'd see: Foo (mp3) Foo (flac) Bar (mp3) Bar (flac) Another would be a generalization of that to separate on some custom grouping tag, so within an artist listing, tracks would be grouped by their value of that tag. And a third option would be to add some configuration options to specify preferences for formats. So I could tell squeezecenter that I prefer flac over mp3 over aac, so if the tags on three tracks all match, it only shows me the track with the format of the highest preference. This would actually be good if it acted below the web interface level, so custom clients such as iPeng (the iphone app) would also only 1 copy of each track.
This sounds like it is possibly a dupe of closed bug 775. Not sure why that one was closed. Perhaps this should also be part of the new scheme considerations.
This bug is a won't fix, the common workaround is to only point SC to your "master" directory containing FLAC, original MP3/AAC, etc. Make your mp3-only directory a mirror of the master, with transcoded versions as needed. This is how I handle it. The reason it's a won't fix, is that determining if a given FLAC and MP3 file are actually the same song is not as easy as you might think. Matching tags is probably not good enough. For example, you wouldn't want to hide the same track appearing on several Greatest Hits albums.
Well, I understand why figuring it out is hard on the track level, but I was talking specifically about the album level. Certainly detecting if two tracks have identical artist/album/track name/track number but differ only in format or location in the file system is possible. Unfortunately your work around isn't an option for me. My 'master' directory contains only a small subset of all my music. The mp3 directory is rsynced to my work and car so I'll have a complete set of all the smaller files. Copying my flac direcory around is 80gigs of unnecessary space since you really can't hear the difference in quality in the car or via my work computer's soundcard.
Your master directory should contain everything, and the mp3 mirror contains an mp3 version of everything in the master.
Well, that is what I have, and why there is a problem. Your work around was for me to manually separate out the mp3 versions of everything for which I also had a flac version. Then to create my mp3 mirror I would need to separate out all the flac files and merge the mp3s back in. While I could make that work by modifying my rsync scripts, it would be a mess, since the rsync needs to work in both directions (in case I fix a tag or something on one of the mirrors). I understand that the bug/feature request isn't going to be addressed, and while I'm disappointed it's certainly your prerogative.