Dealing with multi disc singles

I’m having some issues with matching multi disc singles in Picard, for example:

These are UK style singles with a CD 1 and CD 2 with different content on each but Picard only sees it as one release. Which means you end up having to set the version in the right panel with “Other Versions > CD 1” drag the tracks in for the right release, save, then “Other Versions > CD 2” drag the tracks in for the 2nd release and save which leads to:

music/artist/album/01. track 1 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/01. track 1 from cd2.ext
music/artist/album/02. track 2 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/02. track 2 from cd2.ext

Which isn’t exactly great

Ideally I would like to have something more like a standard multi disc release:

music/artist/album/101. track 1 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/102. track 2 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/201. track 1 from cd2.ext
music/artist/album/202. track 2 from cd2.ext

I could settle for:

music/artist/album (cd1)/01. track 1 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album (cd1)/01. track 2 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album (cd2)/01. track 1 from cd2.ext
music/artist/album (cd2)/02. track 2 from cd2.ext

My main stumbling block is getting Picard to even see them as 2 distinct releases or being able to merge them together.

I could get Picard to do the heavy lifting with the tagging then sort them manually but that seems to defeat the point :wink:

Any Ideas?

The problem as I see it is that these are identically named releases. Looking at the cover art at Discogs I see that they were released with stickers that said “Part 1 of 2” and “Part 2 of 2”. You could add those as disambiguation comments, and then use %_releasecomment% in your naming string. In my naming string I have:

$if(%_releasecomment%, \(%_releasecomment%\))

I had a similar problem with some Japanese singles where it’s fairly common to release slightly different versions. Note the last 2 singles in this list, the (Type-A) and (Type-B) are disambiguation comments;
image

In MB those singles are listed as separate releases. Where they released and distributed separately or came they together in a package? In the latter case the releases should probably be merged into one multi-disc release.

It seems that those releases are correctly separate entities. Here’s my thoughts.

Case 1:
music/artist/album/101. track 1 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/102. track 2 from cd1.ext
music/artist/album/201. track 1 from cd2.ext
music/artist/album/202. track 2 from cd2.ext

This is hard to achieve and isn’t reasonable when considering that we’re handling two separate releases here. If you were able to make this happen with a naming script, it would apply to all releases which are in a same release group.

Case 2:
music/artist/album (part 1)/01. track 1.ext
music/artist/album (part 1)/02. track 2.ext
music/artist/album (part 2)/01. track 1.ext
music/artist/album (part 2)/02. track 2.ext

Using the disambiguation comment in the filename like in Billy_Yank’s reply. For this to work, you need to check that releases which are from a same RG are correctly disambiguated before tagging. Otherwise you’d end up back to OP’s situation.

Case 3:
music/artist/album (43000b2d)/01. track 1.ext
music/artist/album (43000b2d)/02. track 2.ext
music/artist/album (c74754de)/01. track 1.ext
music/artist/album (c74754de)/02. track 2.ext

Using a part of a release MBID to differentiate the releases. As long as you’re not adding the same release twice (or two releases in a same RG have partly same MBIDs which is unlikely), the directories will neatly stay apart without too much effort. This can be done with:

$truncate(%musicbrainz_albumid%,8)

I’d combine this with $upper(%_extension%) so you can add the same release in different formats if necessary.

Since you guys have faced with the same problem as me, could you please give some comments about preferable way of organising MB database here How to deal with multi disc singles?

Other people will have to say whether this is good or bad practice, but I can tell you what I now personally do:

If the CD number isn’t officially part of the title, I use the disambiguation field to specify it. We’re in This Together and Zeroes & Ones are good examples of this.

Then, in a Picard script, I tell it to make an exception for those particular releases, adding the disambiguation field to the end of the name:

$noop(Differentiate different releases belonging to the same release_group and country)
$if($and($eq(%albumartist%,Jesus Jones),$eq(%album%,Zeroes & Ones)),$set(album,%album% \(%_releasecomment%\)))
$if($and($eq(%albumartist%,Nine Inch Nails),$eq(%album%,We're in This Together)),$set(album,%album% \(%_releasecomment%\)))

This isn’t ideal, as it involves lots of manual overriding with scripts, but given that the disambiguation field is currently used for different purposes, it’s the best solution I currently know of, at least for my purposes.

I hope that helps a bit! :blush:

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