I've been poking around a bit and haven't found a way to do what I need to do.

I essentially have 2 collections.  A large Mp3 collection, and a smaller FLAC collection which is a subset of the Mp3 collection.  What I would like to do is have amarok "prefer" any FLAC album over it's mp3 counterpart, unless I'm transferring to a portable media device.  I've been working around the issue by including the format of the album in the album name tag, but this is kind of ugly.  If I don't do this, however, each album shows up with 2x the tracks, and it's difficult to tell which format is which.  Any ideas on how to do this?  Thanks guys.

-Brian

Well, you can make a Smart Playlist, set it up like this:

Match All of the following conditions (tick the box)
Comment -> is -> FLAC
Expand by Artist (tick the box)
Artist

Now, that would just show FLAC songs if you have the word FLAC, but that doesn't exactly solve your situation, but its a shot in the right direction, no?

That's a good idea.  Thanks for the suggestion cubanresourceful.  The only gotcha with this method is that I lose the ability to expand the tree as Artist->Album->Track, but it sure is a step in the right direction.

Yeah, your right. I think its a good suggestion, although I do not have dual collections, it good to know that the functionality is there! Maybe post a comment on the dev blog?

I'm faced with the exact same problem! There really should be a setting in Amarok as to what format to prefer (FLAC!) if the same song is available in different formats. I figure this idea should be pitched to the developers.

For those interested, I found a solution that works pretty well for me.  I didn't realize how configurable the collection browser was.  I simply setup a third "group by" tier and grouped by label.  I "labeled" all of my FLAC albums as such, likewise with Mp3.  Now under each album I have 2 categories, FLAC and MP3.  As an aside, is "label" in this context supposed to have the same meaning as a last.fm "tag", or is it a field for marking the record label?  It seems ambiguous.

I dont know, but good find! Thanks for sharing!

The former...
but the term is ambiguous

deliberately ambiguous, simply because there are so many applications.