Creating aliases in Media Monkey etc?

February 3, 2008 1:07 PM

Is it possible in Media Monkey (or any mp3 libary software) to assign more than one album to an mp3? I have songs that appear on multiple compilations, and I'd like to get rid of some, but I'd rather not leave "holes" in the albums.
posted by user92371 to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Not in any way that would be useful, as far as I know, because even if you could add in an additional ID3 album tag, other MP3 software / players / etc will almost certainly look for a single ID3 tag and stop once they find it. I guess if you were on linux you could symlink files to one another, but you'd still have the problem of only having a single album name.
posted by whir at 2:24 PM on February 3, 2008

Probably wouldn't be pretty, but in iTunes you could add all the other album titles into the comments field and that way if you did a search for say "The Essential Clash" it would bring up Train In Vain, even though the ID3 Tag has it belonging to London Calling. This would of course only work when searching, not in the music library itself. Like I said, definitely not pretty.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 3:00 PM on February 3, 2008

I nearly did the same thing, but then I realized that differences in mastering made for awkward listening when an "album" was composed of songs from different actual albums - it doesn't always flow "sound-wise" and the volume differences can be different. And in some genres - especially reggae, the same "song" may be edited quite differently. Storage is cheap - so why do this?
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 3:12 PM on February 3, 2008

Although MediaMonkey 3 supports multiple entries in the Artist, Album Artist and Genre tags (semi-colon delimited), it doesn't work for Album Title, Year or Track # (issues with order and existence consistency), which is the least that would be required to link one track to multiple albums.

A "virtual" MP3 file format has been postulated on the MM forums which would contain tag information and a pointer to a physical location on the disk, enabling you to "link" one MP3 into two or more albums, but at the moment it's an inelegant solution and hasn't been implemented...

While I concur with the "storage is cheap" attitude, I (most likely like the OP) am a real anal-retentive when it comes to my MP3 collections, and the concept of duplicates just makes me break into a cold sweat! I'm sure it's a problem that will be eventually solved, but (as has also been noted above), any solution is likely to only work in MM until actively implemented by other players, much like the multi-tags for Artist, etc.
posted by benzo8 at 3:53 PM on February 3, 2008

The way to do this would be using playlist (.m3u) files for each of your albums, any number of which could refer to the same mp3 file... but I'd concur with the objections raised about regarding differently-mastered versions of each song. ie: 'duplicates' may not be duplicates.
posted by pompomtom at 4:51 PM on February 3, 2008

Still, this issue is annoying with compilations. I always struggle when tagging compilation tracks with whether to tag the songs with their original albums and artists or the compilation album (and perhaps 'various' or 'soundtrack' or whatever as the artist). Creating playlists for albums does make sense but it goes a little against the notion of being able to browse your music by album. And duplicate tracks in shuffle mode?

Our lives are fraught, man, fraught!
posted by Songdog at 6:15 PM on February 3, 2008

It would have to be maintained manually, but Media Monkey has 3 'Custom' columns. You can set what they are in Options somewhere (not home right now) and then you can display them by right clicking the columns and selecting you new field.
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 8:13 PM on February 3, 2008

B(oYo)BIES is correct. There are three Custom fields which are located in the Properties dialog under the Classification tab. I've never tried them before, but since I'm thinking of it now, I might give it a go.

While I'm here, I'd like to make a few comments about organizing and what would be great... just because I can. :P

First off, MediaMonkey (in my opinion), is far superior to iTunes when it comes to organizing music. However that said, it still lacks my number one dream; that being a way to actually tag mp3s altogether. Like del.icio.us, I'd love to be able to tag my music any way I see fit and in a way that is incredibly simple. For example when you select Genre, it might actually fall into a number of so-called Genres. Take Braveheart, it would be a movie soundtrack, it would also be instrumental, Celtic and even quotes too (the Sons of Scotland speech is on the CD).

The old "Microsoft way" of limiting our abilities to file things in only one way is now archaic.
posted by magnoliasouth at 7:29 AM on February 4, 2008

As I mentioned earlier, you can put multiple Genres into the Genre field in MediaMonkey 3, by separating them with a semicolon. The same MP3s will then appear in each of the various genre nodes. This also works for Artist and Album Artist, so by changing all those duets from "Elton John & Kiki Dee" to "Elton John ; Kiki Dee" enables you to see the song listed under both Artists' nodes...
posted by benzo8 at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2008

I have become so reliant on on MM's ability to tag from Amazon, that I try not to get CDs that I cannot find on Amazon first. My method of madness is to import a new CD into MM. I then right click the folder and Auto-Tag with Amazon. 99% of the time this comes with the picture art. Two birds... one stone. After tagging, I auto-organize using the following sequence: \ Music \ __Complete CDs \ [Album Artist] \ [Album Artist] - [Year] - [Album] \ [Album] - [Track#] - [Title].mp3

So you end up with something like this: \Music\__Complete CDs\A Perfect Circle\A Perfect Circle - 2000 - Mer De Noms\Mer De Noms - 02 - Magdalena.mp3

Tagging and organizing an album takes less than 1 minute for me. Now I don't get all crazy into Genre and such, but I would imagine that this wouldn't be too much of a pain either. Make sure you check out the scripts and add-ons.
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 8:11 PM on February 4, 2008