I'm really close to having listened to all of the 9,000 tracks on my empeg, everything has either been deleted or lives in a static playlist having a refcount of 1 or better!

The problem is that I have tracks from artists that are duplicates in the sense that they can be from studio albums or "best-ofs". Is there a possible syntax for creating a soup that only contains tracks where a track name is the same as another in the database, with artist the same, and FID different?

I think I know what you're looking for, and I'd like to know the same thing.

You want to know if you have five separate tracks, each a different FID, like this:

Closer To The Heart - Rush
Closer To The Heart - Rush
Closer To The Heart - Rush
Closer To The Heart - Rush
Closer To The Heart - Rush

then how can you get a listing of them all in one spot, so that you can check to make sure they're truly different versions and therefore deserve to have their tracks renamed slightly so you can tell them apart. Or check to see if they are just the same track from a greatest hits album and can be deleted to recover space.

Right now the only way I know how to do this is to view "All Tracks", sort by song title, and start scrolling down the list and looking for pairups. It would be fun to figure out a way to do this by machine to make the job easier.

I was trying to think of a way to do this with the current system and I can't think of one ... I mean, you could get part of the way there by making a tag soup on Title .. But you can't then only get ones that are from the same artist, I don't think.

That's exactly it, yes. It would certainly be do-able in SQL or by doing some MATCH-type stuff in Excel, so I'd love it if it were possible via a soup.

I can't see an easy way to do it. I'm not sure if it is possible to do a soup on two variables, ie "artist=x, track=y", but you'd still have to know which tracks were candidates.

This is something that would really need to be put into JEmplode. Algoritmically it's fairly easy - select all tracks, sort by title, step through list comparing each title to the previous title. If a match is found, compare artist. If matching, verify FIDs are different (or maybe even check the track data?), create playlist with both tracks. Whilst following track also matches criteria append to playlist, Continue step-compare otherwise until done.

But I can't see why Mike would be motivated to do this. Do people often need to create playlists of this nature?

Just Create New Soup Playlist=>Add Tag Layer=>Title. I /think/ that will do it. I seem to recall there is a virtual tag that tells you the number of members of a playlist (size maybe on a playlist?). So inside there, if you sort by size (or whatever it is), you should end up with all the ones that have a count > 0 for a title at the top. I've never really tried to soup on a title though. It might churn for a while.

I've tried this in jemplode 45 with no luck - was "size" a valid tag on that release? Should I try again with the latest version?

My Excel solution would be to use conditional formatting, I think - i.e. the criterion would be to see if concatenation of cell A2 +B2 = that of cell A3 + B3 (where column A = title and column B = artist) then highlight in red if true - then paste that condition down the length of the list of alphabeticallly sorted titles.

I just did this in 56 . The tag is called Playlist Size. It probably only existed after RMML was made for the Karma -- not sure what jEmplode that maps onto. It won't appear in your column list by default, so you need to right click on the column headers and select Columns then pick it from the list. That method worked though. Turns out I have 45 titles that have duplicates (I have 4 Mandolin Rains -- who knew )