AFT and file links

[Cody Christensen]

On Monday 21 April 2008 11:53:00 am Florian Loeffler wrote:
> 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
I personally would love to see this feature of marking two songs as =. 
Sometimes you have a song that is in an album as well as in another album 
such as a sound track of a movie. If you don't want to delete one in order to 
keep the integrity of both albums it would be great to mark their stats 
(score, playcount, labels, place in playlists, etc) as equal. Also sometimes 
they would have slightly different tags such as different album tags and the 
method of marking them as equal should be able to handle that IMO.