How do you deal with soundtracks in your music library?

Question

I never like to add them. I like having everything by artist, and with a soundtrack, it usually makes an artist that I only have one song of. I dislike that. Also, when categorized by artist, I can never listed to the soundtrack itself. Then what if I already have a whole album, then get a soundtrack with a song I already have on it. I don't want two copies of the same song on my hard drive, but i don't want to break up the album, nor do I want to break up the soundtrack.

I use winamp, and I'm not switching to Itunes or anything else for that matter. So winamp users are prefered, but i'm really just curious about what you all do with these decisions because for the most part, they are independent of what player you use

Answer 1

The way I handle it is by making "Soundtrack" and artist in itself, and make the "album" what the soundtrack is of. So if I've got the Sweeney Todd soundtrack, the "artist" field is "Soundtrack," the album name is "Sweeney Todd," and the song title is whatever the song title is.

Answer 2

Winap has an option for "Artist" and another option for "Contributing Artist" (or "Album Artist")

I use both options. I sort by "Artist" and change the names to "Hard Rock Covers" (I have 8 gigs of these covers) etc. While at the end of my columns, I have "Contributing Artist" so I can see clearly who is actually performing.

Works amazing.

I use Windows Media Player, so my columns and order I use are:

Track #, Song Title, Album Artist, Album, Length, Genre, Release Year, Play Count, Bit Rate, Contributing Artist

I am anal about the quality of my library and the naming/sorting scheme.