AFT and file links

[Cody Christensen]

>> This probably would not be an AFT thing.  For one thing, AFT hashes on
>> (among other things) the tag of the file, so if the album is different then
>> the hash will be different too.  In addition, part of the song data is
>>used, and often the exact same song data is not on a best-of vs. a normal
>>release (the volume is slightly different, the amount of silence in the
>> beginning changes, etc). So even then it might not work.
>>
>>Probably the best way to do this would be outside AFT, for another reason
>>as well.  It is similar to a request some others have given us where they
>>have files encoded in i.e. FLAC and MP3 for playback on their home computer
>>vs. their portable device...but they want don't want to see duplicate files
>>in the collection, they want to only see one (the "higher quality one",
>>which is actually not easy to determine, especially comparing lossy to
>>lossy and lossless to lossless).  And they want the statistics to be the
>>same regardless of which one they play.  In such a case, which pretty much
>>matches yours, AFT would be totally useless.
>>
>>I encourage you to think about ways this could be done.  For instance, a
>> collection option where files by the same artist and same song name (but
>> different album) are listed once and share statistics.  But you'd also need
>> to think about how the database would react to this...would you have the
>> statistics table be able to have multiple Unique IDs per entry? How would
>> it be updated without getting stale?  Etc.  I'm not sure that this can be
>> done in a good, non-intrusive way, but if you submit a way that might work
>> well, the developers could take a good hard look at it (but no
>> guarantees)...
>>
>> --Jeff
>You bring up some good points. I realize that it would need to be taken care 
>of out side of AFT but where the original post described something very 
>similar I just posted it as a reply there.

>The way that is in my mind would be something like a spell chacker type 
>interface. A user could run a check for duplicates search and it would look 
>through the database and find songs with similar tags. It could display the 
>details of these tags like a spell checker one above the other and on the 
>side could be options. There could be options like mark as duplicate, ignore, 
>mark top as high quality, mark bottom as high quality, etc. As for the 
>statistics view what about listing the song by the data that is the same and 
>then having a little [+] to explode it into the 2 (or more) duplicate 
>listings details.
>
>Excuse me if this is wrong or impractical I'm not a big programmer I only 
know 
>PHP but, one way I could think about doing this on the database end could be 
>to mark the songs that are duplicates with a hidden tag (or hash type thing) 
>in the database that would identify them as duplicates. One problem I see 
>with that is it could potentially cause a performance issue. I don't know 
>what the performance consequences of checking for that tag when changing 
>stats would be. and also if one's collection had many duplicates then it 
>could potentially be a problem too.
>
>>How would it be updated without getting stale?
>Sorry but I honestly don't know what you mean here.
>
>Maybe with some input from others we could run with an idea similar to this. 
I 
>think for people with no duplicates it would be unobtrusive because they 
>would need to activate it and run the duplicate finder for it to even be 
>present so if they didn't like it they could keep it disabled.

>Ps. You don't need to CC me.

Nobody liked this idea? (or did it somehow not make it to the list?)