iPod 1 Song ... more than 1 Album?

[darwen]

Ok, I cant possibly be the only person with this same obsessive compulsive problem. Can I?

I dont like buying music from iTunes that is part of a compilation because if I like one particular song... I might prefer that artist's full album, right? Take for example the Garden State Soundtrack. It is AMAZING but I also like The Shins and want and album featuring two of the same songs.

How does everyone else deal with this? Buying 2 complete albums with some of the same songs... any ideas?

Someone else MUST have a solution!

 

[Enterprise8875]

I delete the one with the lowest play count. No point in having two identical files taking up space.

 

[ChrisBrightwell]

If you're anal enough, you could delete the files and use symlinks to point the "duplicate" entries to a single file. That's a bit of a pain, but might be worth the effort.

Personally, I'd like to see iTunes develop some sort of functionality to do this internally. The "find duplicates" button is already in place ... it just needs a "consolidate duplicates" entry so that I can select several copies of one song and, set one as the "master", and set the others to link to that master.

 

[darwen]

So everyone just buys two copies? that is absurd!

 

[calculus]

If I have a song that I want to be in two (or more) albums and don't want the file to be duplicated I use playlists. For example, I have a bunch of Sly Stone albums and also wanted his 'greatest hits' so I recreated this as a playlist. Not quite the same as your example but the principle is the same.