OK, this has been something I've wondered for a while, but have never asked.

I have some songs in my iTunes library more than once. I might have it from the original album, on a greatest hits album, and sometimes even on a compilation album. Each version is the same... but the metadata is different depending on where I ripped it from. Ideally I'd like to only have one copy, but have the song "show up" under each Album that it came from. Is there any way to do this, other than creating playlists for all 500+ albums in my library? And if I do create different playlists, can I edit the metadata under one playlist and not have it affect the metadata of another, even though it's the same exact file? I guess I'm looking for something like a symbolic link of the file. Just don't know how to do it in iTunes.

Hard drive is cheap these days. Personally I would bother.

.....you have more than one copy of 'Baby Got Back'.......???

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!

I have not seen anything like that in iTunes. If you have the drive space there is no cost to having multiple copies and as S-T mentioned, there is probably no reason to not have plenty of hard drive space.

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NewtonMP2100
.....you have more than one copy of 'Baby Got Back'.......???

Actually, I have that song in my iTunes library! But only the one copy of that one.

I do have a lot of disk space, but the issue is that eventually I want to put everything onto one mirco-sd card and put it in a cheap Android phone so I can have all of my music with me. Just looking to save some space.

iTunes doesn't know how to reference files in that way, with one instance if a file appearing virtually in multiple locations. At least not with sane metadata.

roon might be able to do it, I don't know. But it's far from free and doesn't compete with iTunes (and vice versa). So it's not an "alternative" to it per se.

I feel your pain. Its your time, your choice. In iTunes 12.x
Find the song you want to keep, and put the other album info in the Comments Section.

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San Antonio, TX (in the old city)


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I can't help you in the least, but I love your question. I was wondering the same thing many years ago. Why can't we have aliases in these situations?

Personally, I've pretty much given up on my ripped iTunes library. All that work managing everything and backing it up, and I rarely use it in favor of Spotify.