I recently decided to collect more music from the famous Japanese rock (J-Rock) group L’Arc-en-Ciel. I already owned some things from them: one full album, random tracks I had heard over the years, a few anime themes, and several solo tracks from their lead singer HYDE. I wanted to get, at a minimum, their single collections and greatest hits albums from Freegal. I succeeded in that task.
As always, however, collecting a large amount of new music introduced new problems into my iTunes library that I had to sort out. This time, the issues involved remastered albums and duplicates.
“Remastered” Issues
One thing I immediately noticed was that three of the albums I had downloaded—specifically KISS, SMILE, and AWAKE—were the remastered versions. A remastered album comes about when they work some studio magic on the original tracks to improve their quality. While I was excited to get an upgrade, the discovery created two organization questions:
1) What is the best way to label the remastered songs?
2) Should I keep the original songs, the remastered versions, or both?
“Remastered” Naming Scheme
What is the best way to label the remastered songs?
To be clear, the remastered music was already labeled. The remastered albums had the format “[Album Name](Remastered [Year]),” ex. AWAKE (Remastered 2022). Meanwhile, each track was formatted as “[Song Title] – Remastered (Year),” ex. “New World – Remastered 2022.”
Now, I didn’t care so much about having the “Remastered” label in the album name itself, but I hated it on the songs. It looked clunky. My options were to either erase the label from the song title entirely, or to change the title to a format that matched the album name.
Laziness almost won out. I didn’t feel like messing with all of those titles in iTunes. I was also concerned that changing the titles might mess up the process if I decided to subscribe to iTunes Match or a similar music matching service one day. But the inconsistency bothered me too much. I couldn’t ignore it.
Ultimately, I changed the format to “[Song Title](Remastered [Year])” for each of the remastered tracks. Thus, “New World – Remastered 2022” became “New World (Remastered 2022).” Such a simple change yet so satisfying to my brain!
This ended up being the correct decision. When I later started collecting the best collections from another J-Rock group I like, Asian Kung-Fu Generation, they had some reworked songs of their own. Those songs had parenthetical labels in the song titles, ex. “Rewrite (2016 Rerecorded).” L’Arc’s remastered titles matched that format thanks to my intervention, so I didn’t have to make any further changes to my library.
Which Version To Keep?
Should I keep the original songs, the remastered versions, or both?
iTunes viewed the remastered albums as different from the original versions that were already in my library because of that “remastered” label. In theory, I agree—they’re not the same. In practice, I ended up with two copies of everything.
I felt like I had to pick one version to reduce the clutter. I deleted the original versions. Remastered versions are inherently better than the original, so it didn’t make sense to keep the original versions anymore. Plus, many of the original versions were iTunes Store purchases, so I can always redownload them if I need to.
Duplicates Issues
Once I sorted out my L’Arc-en-Ciel songs, I took a look at the rest of my music library. I wanted to see if I needed to adjust anything else according to my new “Remastered” rules. The duplicates list seemed to be the easiest place to check, so I started there. Just so—I had 34 items to sort out, though none of them were remasters.
I determined that the duplicates fell into one of four categories:
- Same Song, Different Albums
- Same Song, Different Versions
- Same Song, Different Acquisition Method
- Same Title, Different Songs
Same Song, Different Albums
I had a few items that were the same song from different albums. This was often a song that was released as a single and then featured on the full album. Even though my current rule is to change the metadata to merge the singles/pre-release songs with the rest of the full album, I still have remnants in my library from my old rule of downloading and keeping both versions.
For these cases, I erased the single version of the songs and kept the album version.
Same Song, Different Versions
Some duplicate items were two versions of the same song. In other words, a song that had been arranged or performed in different ways.
L’Arc-en-Ciel popped up again. Their song “Kasou” appears on both The Best of L’Arc-en-Ciel 1998-2000 and The Best of L’Arc-en-Ciel c/w. It didn’t make sense for them to put the same song on two themed single collections, so I knew there had to be a difference between the two versions besides their run times (5:13 versus 5:06). I checked Wiki and discovered that the version on The Best of L’Arc-en-Ciel c/w is actually known as “Kasou (1014 Mix).” I added that subtitle to the song title and bye-bye, duplicate issue!
Similarly, several Utada Hikaru songs were flagged as duplicates because of improper labeling. Or, more accurately, absent labeling. Here, I saw that the tracks from their live album Science Fiction Tour 2024 weren’t labeled as such. I fixed it by adding “Live” in parenthesis to the song title to indicate their differences.
Other duplicates weren’t as easy to fix. For example, I have both the Careful Confessions and Little Voice versions of Sara Bareilles’ song “Gravity.” They have different arrangements (soft rock versus contemporary pop). Although I prefer the Careful Confessions version, I like the Little Voice version enough that I don’t want to delete it. The same goes for Jewel and Amy Winehouse, who both have duplicate songs where one is the original release and one is a reworked version that came later.
The solution? There wasn’t a good one. None of these songs have official subtitles or other labels that I can use to separate them from each other. How I handled them varied from case to case. For Sara Bareilles and Amy Winehouse’s songs, I simply unchecked my least favorite versions so they won’t come up in the shuffle or sync to any devices. For Jewel’s songs, I deleted the original versions (which I was never crazy about anyway) and kept the reworked versions.
Same Song, Different Acquisition Method
Some of the duplicate songs were the same song that I got from different places. I bought these songs from the iTunes Store back when it applied DRM (digital rights management) to everything. I have replaced many of them with clean downloads from Freegal or rips from CDs.
Case in point, I originally purchased some songs from acid android, a J-Rock group lead by the L’Arc-en-Ciel member yukihiro, from the iTunes Store. Somewhere down the line, I found the album on Freegal, so I downloaded it and deleted the DRM’ed copies. However, the DRM’ed copies remained in my library as ghosts—not physically there, but still floating around. iTunes kept flagging them as duplicates and displayed the iCloud download symbol on them.
While I couldn’t completely delete the song, I found out that I could create the illusion of deletion by selecting “Delete from Library” from the songs’ right-click menu. Basically, this “hides” them from the rest of my iTunes purchases and makes the iCloud symbol disappear. Most importantly, it eliminates the duplicate problem.
Same Title, Different Songs
It’s rare, but sometimes an artist recycles song titles. Then you end up with two (or more) different songs called the same thing. There was only one instance of this problem on my duplicates list: MONSTA X and their two “Secrets.”
These are two completely different songs. One appears on their The Dreaming English-language album and the other one is on their One of a Kind album. There’s no way to distinguish between the versions at a glance except for the album titles.
I had to let this one go. I’ll know the difference when they start playing. There’s no point in making more work for myself.