Head Tale

I'm trying to free up some space on my hard drive (70 GB of music on a 200 GB drive will do that to you) so am looking through my duplicate MP3 files (which make up ~10 GB of that collection). 

Looking closer, I see that there are a few songs that I have no less than SIX different copies of, all by the same artist (ie. not cover versions by other artists.) 

Some are because the song was released on the original album then on a greatest hits album and maybe one (or even more) live albums or reissues.  Then I also end up with copies of the same song due to some collections I've downloaded like “Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs”, “Top 500 Alternative Songs”, “Top 101 Love Songs” – stuff like that – where the song might show up a couple times as well. 

Here are the tunes that I have six copies of…
John Lennon – “Give Peace A Chance”
John Lennon – “Imagine”
John Lennon – “Woman” 
(The first two are Lennon songs I'd expect to show up in enough places to get me up to six copies but “Woman” was a bit of a surprise.  I guess it hit a couple “Love Song” anthologies I have to put it over the top.)
Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”
REM – “Losing My Religion”

The solution seems pretty straight-forward – every time I see a copy of a song that I know is the exact same version of a song I already have (ie. one from the original album, one from the greatest hits collection but not one from the original album and one from a live album) – delete it.  Which works in a digital landscape. 

But my problem is that I grew up in the analog age and I still respect the integrity of the album and even of the “Various Artists” collections.  So even for those “101 Best Love Songs” groupings, I'm reluctant to delete the duplicates because then it becomes “83 Love Songs That Happen To Be Songs You Don't Already Have Copies Of” and the integrity of the original 101 songs is lost. 

Yeah, stupid, I know but that's what I'm struggling with today.  (As that hard drive fills up even more, I suspect I'll become a lot more easily convinced to delete the duplicates.)