My music collection is broken down into two formats: ALAC (Apple Lossless) for archival and home listening purposes, as well as MP3s for use in portables. In practical use this means that for every ALAC album, I have a copy of it in MP3. I also have a number of downloaded MP3s that are all on their own. What I want to see when I'm viewing my music library is all my ALAC files, and any MP3s that don't have any higher bitrate counterparts.

Sort of like this:

[stored in music library]
AAA - ALAC & MP3
BBB - ALAC & MP3
CCC - MP3

[visible in music library]
AAA - ALAC
BBB - ALAC
CCC - MP3

I know I can make dynamic playlists to show either ALAC or MP3 exclusively, but this doesn't solve my problem (if I looked at only the ALACs, I'd miss the lone mp3s, if I looked at the MP3s, that would defeat some of the purpose of having higher quality files around).

The simplest solution would just be a "hide from view" checkbox, but that doesn't exist. Unchecking the lower bitrate music in the main view unchecks in any playlists also, which becomes incredibly annoying whenever I want to move music onto my portable.

I could use a hand here. Maybe someone knows a way to do this with a dynamic playlist, or can tell me about a menu option I'm missing.

Thanks!

Try to contact Doug at dougscripts.com He will be probably interested into researching this.

Your best bet is probably to mass tag all your duplicate MP3's with an identifiable keyword (such as "duplicate" in the comments section), and make it a habit to use this keyword every time you duplicate an album from ALAC to MP3. Then you can easily use a smart playlist to show all ALAC and all MP3 where comments do not contain the keyword "duplicate."