Handling Multiple Songs With The Same Name

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

I've recently begun the task of making sure each of my songs has a unique name. I have a number of songs (aproximately 2,000) in my collection with the same name. In some cases they are different songs with the same name (like "It's Too Late" by Bobby Goldsboro and "It's Too Late" by Carole King). In other cases, I have two different versions of the same songs by the same artist (like "And I Love You So" by Don McLean, one version from 1970 and another from 1992).

In the past, I've appended a number in brackets (like "[1]")to the end of song's name to differentiate between different versions of the song. However, the weakness with this is that it doesn't indicate which song it is just from the song's name. I usually choose songs by name.

BTW, a convention I've been following when writing my tags is that I put any extra information I add to a song's title, artist, and album information in brackets. This makes it easy to identify the information that I have added.

What I've started doing is to put the artist's name in brackets after the song's name. In the case of two versions of the same song by the same artist, I put the year after the artist's name. To illustrate from the examples in the first paragraph:

- It's Too Late [Bobby Goldsboro]
- It's Too Late [Carole King]
- And I Love You So [Don McLean - 1970]
- And I Love You So [Don McLean - 1992]

The exception I've made to this is with audiobooks and spoken-word comedy albums. It is mainly because with these types of albums I usually listen to them in order as an entire album and rarely put more than one on my player at one time.

I wanted to find out how others handle this issue. Thanks in advance.