AFT and file links

[Florian Loeffler]

Hello
I have posted a question into the Amarok forum a couple of days ago ( 
http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/topic,15284.0.html ) and someone told 
me I should send an email to this address.
So what I have asked about was the behavior of Amarok's  AFT feature regarding 
file links. The thing is, that probably most music collections will have 
tracks that occur on different albums but are actually identical (say on the 
album of its first release and on a best-of compilation). I personally find 
it not very efficient to treat these files as completely independent, it is 
not only a waste of hard disk space but also confusing since they have 
different statistics (e.g. individual playcounts), you have to rate each one 
seperately and if you create a smart playlist that looks for a certain 
pattern (labels?) you may have the same song twice or more times in your 
playlist.
Therefore I was wondering if you could have all these different songs point to 
just one common file by using soft- or hardlinks. I do not exactly know how 
Amarok creates the unique IDs used for AFT, but since all of them would 
contain the exact same data, they should get the same unique ID, right? And 
this in turn would mean they have common statistics? I'm not sure if the 
problem with the several occurences in a playlist could be solved this way, 
though.
I do not know how other people think about this matter, but I think it may be 
an interesting feature to consider for some future Amarok version. Right now, 
however, this is only my personal curiosity, because I have started to learn 
ruby and was thinking about useful scripts that could be written for Amarok.

Thanks
Florian Löffler
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