This is obviously a matter of preference, but I’m wondering what most folks do.
Say you have several Springsteen CDs loaded into iTunes. Then you acquire Springsteen’s Greatest Hits CD, which contains several songs that you already own from their original CDs.
My question is whether or not you load the entire Greatest Hits CD, or just the songs that you do not already have.
If you load the entire GH CD, obviously you will have doubles within your playlist. The advantage, though, is that if you want to listen to the GH CD, you can just click it and enjoy the entire CD.
If you load just the new tunes, you will save space and avoid doubles, but you cannot easily play the GH CD.
I load the entire CD. When you say “your playlist,” do you mean your entire library? Because you can, of course, create playlists which include or omit whichever songs you want.
This comes up for me a lot as I have a ton of singles (which I buy for the b-sides) that also appear on albums. I used to just load the b-sides and not the single, but it’s easier just to load the whole thing. Plus, if I want to listen to the whole single later, it’s too much of a pain to track down the track from the album.
Between singles, albums and compilations, I have some songs four or five times over on my iPod. Memory is cheap.
And I know you can create playlists. But you have to figure out the missing songs, hunt for them, then create the playlist. Much easier to just click the Greatest Hits Cd if that is what you want to listen to.
mmm
I find that there are often slight changes or edits to songs between albums that can affect the listening experience; usually different fade-outs, but sometimes more abrupt endings or seamless segues into the next track, louder or softer remasters, removal of tape-hiss, surface noise, crowd noise, echoes, etc. I tried the space-saving method of creating playlists using single instances of songs to recreate given albums or compilations, but the effect was kind of jarring as songs could feel “off” from what I was used to when I listen to full albums, so I’ve just begun to rip discs in their entirety. Three terabytes of storage, so it’s not like it’s a huge burden to have extra copies of a song.
Really, I’m the only person who picked Other? I load the songs I want, and don’t load others. Sometimes that’s because of duplication, sometimes not. I don’t see any particular value in having the entire contents of all my CDs intact on my iPod.
One thing I don’t like about iTunes is that it lacks a “Shuffle Artist” option. Sometimes I’m in the mood to hear everything in my playlist artist by artist, and I don’t have that option except by a manual sort.
What I’ve done is replaced the album name with the artist’s name on all my music, so whatever playlist I’m using, I can hear everything by each artist by choosing the Sort Album. The only exception I’ve allowed is the Beatles, because I have so many more of their songs than any other group. Took a shitload of time to do it the first time. but now I do it as part of my routine whenever I add more music.
I load all the songs from the CD, then once it’s done I go to the main library and type the artist name into the search box, then sort by name of track: that way I can go down the list and see which songs are duplicates and compare the running time of said duplicates. If I see that the album version of a song is 4:30 and the version I’ve just picked up on a hits album is 3:45, I know I’ve got an edited version and that is, therefore, not a duplicate. Edits/single mixes get kept, exact copies get deleted.
So yes I load every song on every CD into my iTunes, but once I’m finished the whole process there are no duplicate tracks left in my library.
Edit: oh, and if I do see an exact duplicate (lets see how many times I can fit that word into a single post) it always gets kept on the album it appeared on first.
It’s easier, I have plenty of memory, and it bugs me if I see a random track missing from an album.
Back when I was worried about space, the real dilemma was whether to import as mp3s or lossless. I chose mp3 at the time, but now that there is a lossless format with some compression, I might eventually reimport some of those CDs.
It really depends for me. I won’t necessarily include the entire “greatest hits” because it’s not like the thing was designed as a cohesive album, anyway. But for instance - Depeche Mode’s “Fly on the Windscreen” was a b-side and then later it was on an album. I keep both because the original version is slightly different and it would definitely disrupt the flow of the album without it. Also, all different live albums keep all their tracks.