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Much easier solution using unix links
Authored by: alys on Jun 26, '04 10:34:02PM

That's an interesting idea so I tried it out, but it has disadvantages. It WILL result in the track appearing twice in iTunes (or more often if you run the ln command more than once), and you CAN set the start and end times separately for each copy (and also the ratings), but you can't set separate track names (or artists, albums, etc). If you change the track name on one copy of the track, it will immediately be changed on all the other copies. You won't see the change in the other copies immediately, because the track listing screen doesn't refresh itself automatically, but if you go into the info window for any of the other copies, you'll see the track name has changed.

This is because the track name (and artist, album, etc) is stored in the file itself, in the ID3 tags. The ln command does not make a new, separate file -- instead it causes the original file to "appear" twice -- so when you change one "copy" of the file, then other "copy" changes automatically. The only thing that can be different between the two "copies" of the file can be the file name.

The start and end times and the rating can be different for the "copies" when set in iTunes because they are stored in iTunes database (as the poster said), not in the files themselves. However since you can't tell the difference between the "copies" of the file (other than by going into the file info to check the start and end times), using ln probably is not useful for this. I suppose you could change the rating of each "copy", but that only works if you have no more than five "copies" of the file.



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Much easier solution using unix links
Authored by: secahtah on Jul 31, '04 06:09:15PM

It seems that Techno/Trance/etc CDs are affected by this as well. This has been my only real gripe about iTunes is that it simply isn't able to handle the crossfading of tracks. The DJs mix the tracks together and there is a really nice flow from one song to the next - in iTunes, if you turn off the pause between tracks, you can still hear a blatent pause that disrupts the transition between tracks. If you try to crossfade it, it also ruins the continuity because the DJ has already crossfaded it.



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