How to save a song if it appears in multiple albums?

Hello, new user here, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities with picard and I can’t seem to find a solution for this:

I have all of my songs together in one folder, suppose one song appears in two albums. I save album 1 on the right panel. When I go to album 2 the song appears with a green musical note, if I move the song from album 1 to album 2 and save album 2 it will be removed from album 1. So how do I save it in both albums with different track numbers at the same time?

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Do you want to have the result as one or two files?

For the latter and if the file actually only exists once, you have to copy it first. Picard can’t do that and treats them as the same file.

Then you have to make sure that album 1 and 2 use different files. If you click on the track in the right panel the filename app ears in the bottom status bar.

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Do you know about if you want it to be the same file?

The way tags in audio files work there is no way AFAIK to tag one file as being in two different albums. It’s plausible that some music library has a proprietary setting for this but I don’t believe it will be sharable between programmes. Each file is tagged with one album name (or none). (I assume that’s the question you’re asking?) An option would be to use album playlists.

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Some players, I know for sure MusicBee and I think media monkey, have a way to use dummy files to save different tags but point to the same audio file. That’s not going to be a universal solution, though.

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It seems the mediamonkey way, through a plugin, uses asx files to for each version of the track to hold the metadata and point to the one audio file. Although this isn’t strictly a one file solution the plugin author claims the asx files are understood by many other music players.

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Yeah, MusicBee also uses .asx so they should be transferrable.

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It might be better to keep both files as they’re probably mastered differently.

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