QUOTE (trainee @ Jan 1 2013, 23:44) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
1. Holiday Music: in general I want to exclude it from playback and searches except when I explicitly only want to search for it. Not sure the best way to achieve this.
If you want to keep the holiday music in the library all year, then that's going to be completely dependent on the abilities of your playback software. One way that's less software dependent is to store the holiday music in a separate folder tree and remove it from your library after the holidays.
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2. Single Directory or Separate Folders: I find that most programs deal better with separate directories for each album, but that means 2 full directory structures 1 for Lossless and 1 for Lossy, otherwise I get 2 copies of each song
Yes, one folder per album is usually best. And, yes, separate folder structures for each use is how I handle it. Probably 95% of my Mp3s are from transcoding my main library, which is in FLAC, to Mp3 for my portable players. So I also have a second Mp3 folder for Mp3s found elsewhere. So my directories look a little like:
E:\flac
F:\mp3
F:\mp3-other
Of the above, since F:\mp3 is only used to load my portable players, it's kept out of my home library. If I have something only in Mp3 and happen to later get a FLAC copy, I'll remove the album from mp3-other.
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3. Same song different artist, different song same title: is there any good solution for identifying when a song truly is the exact same song tackled by different artists vs totally different songs with the same title?
Other than assigning different titles or being able to see the composer, I don't know of any. Maybe you could add the composer name in brackets to the title just for these cases. This should only really be an issue when doing searches.