De-duplicating on Synology DS412+

[Pepsican]

Be careful with the de-duplication function in PerfectTunes. The way it works is it will find duplicate songs and giving you the option to delete the duplicate.

So, if you have "We will rock you" on for example "Queen: greatest hits" and "News of the World", then it will find a duplicate and remove it. Of course, that means one of the two albums now no longer has a complete list of songs in its folder on the drive. So, the de-duplication feature is really much more for people who listen to songs rather than albums and who are somewhat tight on disk space.

Or you could have all the songs in a single folder and use playlists to represent the albums. But in that case you would do away with album art (after all, in the above example, which album cover would you show when playing We Will Rock You? The FLAC can only contain one embedded front-cover image.) and you'd need to decide what to do with special versions (single-cut on a collection album or from the CD single versus the album version). Also, it is just a different way of doing what needs to be done: organise your music files.

If I were you, I'd go through the trouble of organising your songs and applying the correct metadata (MP3Tag is a good Windows and Linux programme to do this with). And then you'll also find that building playlists and keeping songs separate becomes easier.