preventing repeats while playing all titles from an artist

[gbonawitz]

Is there a way to prevent repeats while playing everything from a particular artist?
Let's say I have a bunch of the artists albums, including some Greatest Hits albums. That greatest hits album contains copies of some of the songs from the other individual albums. How do I make sure that any one partiular song title, regardless if it's on multiple albums, plays only once?
Am I stuck with the only solution being setting up a playlist for that artist? (or deleting the duplicates?)

Thanks

[ceejay]

I don't think there is an easy answer to this. You could as you say, delete duplicate tracks or make a custom playlist.

Its probably writeable as a plugin but I don't remember seeing anything that would do this - the tricky bit would be looking for names that are "nearly" the same (for example, if you have track numbers in your track names, which a lot of people do, the logic would have to ignore that bit).

Ceejay

[Smiley Dan]

I suppose the answer comes down to determining an identity for a song. If the songs are identified consistently in the filename you could probably do something with the SQL query tool. I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a track identifier kept by allmusic or something like that, but if so you could update your tags with it, and include that in the selection criteria... do you understand what I mean?

[Smiley Dan]

I've been looking around some more... there are things like TRMs and PUIDs, part of MusicBrainz which aim to identify a piece of music. I'm not sure on the completeness of this information, or even whether it can truly be made to work, but something to investigate.

Of course I don't think SlimServer looks at these tags so you'd still have to roll your own playlist using the sql querier.