If I have a duplicate track (exactly the same name and artist) it would be great if 'something' other than me could determine this and just put a playlist link instead of another MP3.

Well, that's not exactly how it works, and there's a good reason for it (I'll get to that in a minute).

Right now, here's how it works: If you don't want the Empeg to have duplicate files, then simply don't upload the dupes to it in the first place. Upload one copy of the song and make your own links to it in the various playlists.

What I meant about duplicate entries is this: If you copy a song (one that's already been uploaded to the Empeg) to more than one playlist (within the Empeg), it won't make two copies of the song on the Empeg's hard disk. The second copy is just a link to the first file. This makes perfect sense, of course.

But if there's a song that already exists in the Empeg, and you have another copy of the song on your PC hard disk, and you drag it from the Windows Explorer and drop it onto Emplode, then Emplode will dutifully copy the song onto the Empeg for you again, because that's what you told it to do.

Emplode has no way of checking whether it's the same song. Even if it did, that wouldn't help your particular situation: Having the same piece published on two different compilation albums. Because your MP3 files from those two different albums would be slightly different (different amounts of silence between the tracks, possibly even different EQ/Volume/Compression, etc.).

If Emplode used just the track information alone to determine a dupe, it might remove dupes that aren't really dupes. For example, I have many songs with the same title/artist, but they are different performances of the song. For instance, one might be the original studio recording, the second might be a live concert recording, the third might be a remastered version of the song, and the fourth might be a remix or an extended mix. So that's the good reason behind the fact that it doesn't use either the tag data or the audio data for dupe checking.

My whole point for starting this thread wasn't to talk about Emplode's dupe checking ability, I just used that as one example as to how a Search feature might be useful in Emplode.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144