iTunes/iPod library - multiple links to songs?

[George Neuner]

Hi all,

Apologies for the cross post - I'm not sure which camp (Mac or
Windows) might best answer this. I'm running iTunes 4.9 on Windows
but my question is really about manipulating the indexing on the iPod.

After ripping my entire CD collection, I find that I have multiple
copies of quite a few songs that appeared on multiple albums by the
same artist or were included in song collections that I have as well
the original artist's album. In all I have about 300MB of duplicate
songs. Though I have a few GB free on the iPod, I would prefer not to
waste space on dups.

What I would like to do is put just one copy of a duplicated song on
the iPod, but be able to access it through the song list for each
album it appeared on.

I have found the iTunes library XML file on the PC and I know on the
iPod the song files have mangled names like DZXY.mp3 and are located
in subdirectories of iPod_Control\Music\, but I can't find any [human
readable] file that appears to be an index of mangled file names.

Do I have to manually sort out all the songs by artist on the PC,
change/remove the album tag information,and then make up a separate
playlist for each album? Or can someone suggest a better way to go
about it?

Thanks,
George

 

[Galley]

Hi all,

Apologies for the cross post - I'm not sure which camp (Mac or
Windows) might best answer this. I'm running iTunes 4.9 on Windows
but my question is really about manipulating the indexing on the iPod.

After ripping my entire CD collection, I find that I have multiple
copies of quite a few songs that appeared on multiple albums by the
same artist or were included in song collections that I have as well
the original artist's album. In all I have about 300MB of duplicate
songs. Though I have a few GB free on the iPod, I would prefer not to
waste space on dups.

What I would like to do is put just one copy of a duplicated song on
the iPod, but be able to access it through the song list for each
album it appeared on.

I have found the iTunes library XML file on the PC and I know on the
iPod the song files have mangled names like DZXY.mp3 and are located
in subdirectories of iPod_Control\Music\, but I can't find any [human
readable] file that appears to be an index of mangled file names.

Do I have to manually sort out all the songs by artist on the PC,
change/remove the album tag information,and then make up a separate
playlist for each album? Or can someone suggest a better way to go
about it?

Thanks,
George

Use the "show duplicates" features in iTunes, and then uncheck the duplicate
files. Make sure your playlists have the "match only checked songs" box
checked.