Pandamasque wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2024 8:19 am
My music collection is alphabetised. So, say 2 artists made a collaboration album. Instead of duplicating the entire album in both artists' folders I store the files only under Artist A and then just add shortcuts to each relevant album to the folder of Artist B. Same is useful to keep track of various side projects of prolific artists.
Makes sense?
Doesn't really make sense (to me).
One of the main benefits of a Media Manager, like MediaMonkey, is that it is powered by a database which takes over all the work related to where your music
is stored, so that you can just focus upon
what the music is, eg. Artist, album, genre, rating, etc.
In your illustration you have navigated to the Folder node. That is not looking at your database, it is looking at the file structure on your disk. You are missing almost all of MediaMonkey's power there. I would only use that node if I was going to move the music to some other place.
Go to the music node, right click a track, and select "Properties".
There is only a single copy
of this track in my collection. It is
stored under Robert Fripp.
In the MediaMonkey database it is indexed twice in the AlbumArtists node; under Robert Fripp, and also under Brian Eno.
This is automatically triggered by having the two artists in the AlbumArtist tag, separated by a semi-colon and a blank space.
MediaMonkey will manage the situation, and store your tags, including multiple value tags, into your actual tracks.
NB. You need to have the option "Update Tags When Editing Tags" option check at Tools>Options>Library>Tags&Playlists
This information is therefore available other Music Manager tools you may use or migrate to.
I could have done the same thing in the Artist tag. ... I didn't do that because I never use the Artist index.
All of the Music Managers will abstract themselves from the files physical location names and file name.
You don't need those things to browse music, or to play music, or to build playlists.
You don't need those names anymore for anything, unless you are moving or deleting or creating backup of tracks.
It may feel comfortable to use the names of the folders and the files, but there is nothing special about them. They are an just an abstraction also. Any individual track will likely be split into pieces, and be poked into little gaps across the various platters that make up your hard drive. The Windows Operating System gives all these little pieces a single name so that you can access it. ... A Music Manager takes this further again, by allowing you to assign multiple attributes, which are meaningful to yourself, to your track; like Artist(s), album, date release, rating, etc etc. You can navigate to the track using any of those attributes.
So this a Red Pill vs Blue Pill situation. .. Good luck.