I have several copies of some albums, for a variety of reasons (file format: I prefer ogg or flac but I have a hardware mp3 player; availability: the bulk of my music is on a network drive this laptop doesn\'t always have access to, so I have local copies of some of it; organization: if I want to use xmms sometimes, it\'s nice to have copies or symlinks in other places so I can enqueue directories).

Unfortunately, the effect of this is that I can\'t easily enqueue the albums from the collection browser - each song gets played N times. For some reason, the \"remove duplicates from playlist\" doesn\'t do anything. So I have to manually pick out N-1 copies of each song and remove them from the playlist. Wotta pain! And of course they\'re my favorite albums.

Currently, my options are:
* Remove the duplicates from my filesystem. I don\'t want to do this because of the reasons listed above.
* Tag the other copies with some wrong album name. I don\'t want to confuse musicbrainz/scrobbler/coverviewer/whatever, and I don\'t want to have to look at bogus album names.
* Arrange for only one copy to be indexed by the collection manager. I don\'t want to do this because it requires me to hunt through a forest of directories to find files that occur in two places (possibly with different filenames) and separate them.

I don\'t know what the Right Way to solve this is, but I have some ideas:
* Allow me to tick \"ignore this file\" in the collection manager (or filesystem browser, or whatever) making the file hidden. If ever I need to get it back I can turn on \"show hidden files\" or whatever.
* Allow me to create fake albums for second, third, etc. copies.
* If two files have the same artist, album, title, and track number, put them in another level of the tree (that is, instead of a track being a leaf, you can expand a track to list copies of the track; this could show filenames, which would be nice for other reasons). Then enqueuing a bunch of tracks would simply pick one copy of each (ideally the best-quality version, but whatever) and enqueue those.

I like amaroK, and will keep using it regardless, but this would be a significant usability improvement...

.

Your problem is pretty unique, so its kind of hard to solve without bloat.

I think blacklist coud be useful to you...

Similar situation with having full discs and maxi-singles that have the same title.

i.e. Def Leppard - Hysteria (the album)
Def Leppard - Hysteria (the maxi-single)

Since everything I have is MB-tagged, they have the same name and thus end up being considered the same album.

This is where stuff like MBIDs, or even \"smart\" path-checking might come in handy. Though I\'m aware both of those options have limitations that would make them hard to implement. (Not everyone MB-tags their files for some sad reason, paths are different for every user, especially the Kazaa downloaders who put all their files in one directory, etc.)

I rather doubt that my problem is unique, in fact. I know many people who keep a zillion tracks on some sever with loads of disk space and listen to them on a laptop. If they want the possibility of disconnected operation, which some of them surely do, they\'re going to run into exactly the problem I do.

Yes, the \"removeable media\" problem is certainly an issue worth dealing with, its just not a issue we\'ve figure out how to resolve yet.

...but I don\'t see the relevance to your issue.

Well, in my case, and probably in many others\', there is some overlap between what\'s on the local disk and what\'s on the removable medium. So, for example, I have a copy of Massive Attack\'s Mezzanine both on my local disk and on the network drive. When I\'m not connected to the network, I can play it just fine by dragging the album to my playlist. But when I\'m connected to the network drive, if I do that, I get every song twice. So I have to go through and remove every second song.

The very simplest solution would be this: when enqueueing an album, amarok simply chooses (at random, say) one copy from among each collection with the same artist/album/track number (one could even require the track titles to be the same).

It would be nice to also group them in the collection listing, but if that\'s too complicated, I can live with an album listing that has two or three copies of every song on it.

Just to be clear, this is what I see in the artist/album view:
Massive Attack
Mezzanine
Angel
Angel
Risingson
Risingson
Teardrop
Teardrop
...