Advise how to configure settings to group as much as possible songs into an album

[xbmcgotham]

Hi, new to this tool, so hope someone can advice.

I have a lot of songs. These are currently saved as:

Artists #-D > Artist Name > Album Name

Originally all songs where in one folder. Unfortunately past music organising tools I used indexed these and pushed them in artist albums, but not always efficient. For example creating 4 albums filled each with a couple of songs even though some of the songs could have been put together in one album. I like to use SongKong to go through my full collection and do the re-organising so that albums are filled completely instead of being split up, and also moved into the corrected album folders when changed.

I understand this is possible but I am not sure how.

What are the steps to take (prepping of the files?) and what do I need to configure in SongKong?

Thanks for your help!

[paultaylor]

Hi, first step would be to run Status Report on whole collection so have an accurate record of starting point. Then run Fix Songs with Default profile , this should improve things considerably without actually moving or renaming any files. Then I suggest you run Create Support Files so I can review for you, and look at the Inconsistencies section of report, this should help identify albums that are still split up and need further work.

Usually you should fix your metadata first before trying to rename files from the metadata

[xbmcgotham]

Thanks for getting back to me and the kind offer. I will do that first and let you know when its ready. It might take me some weeks as its a big collection. Have a nice day.

[paultaylor]

Since organized by artist first letter If it’s really big, might be worth just trying out the process for just letter A first.

[xbmcgotham]

I was able to process all the files overnight. I am checking some of them and noticed something strange. When I open the files in MusicBrainz, I can see two tags, one called Artist and one called Artists. The Artists tag shows always the same name twice. I have tried finding in the SongKong settings if this is something I need to change, but I cant find it. Any ideas? I did make sure to chose rematch option. So as I understand this, it will replace all meta data.

[paultaylor]

The thing I notice is Track Length is different, how can that change?

There is not enough context for me to answer your question, please run Create Support Files so I can work out what has happened here.

[xbmcgotham]

sure, let me do this now.

[xbmcgotham]

It was successfully uploaded, however I dont see it in the thread mentioned. Is this only shown to employees of jthink?

[paultaylor]

Thanks, its is sent to jthink server not the forum, will look at it now.

[paultaylor]

Okay I think I know the issue, the file in question is an Mp3 file so uses the ID3v2 tagging format, there are differecnes between Picard and SongKong for this field

Name	Picard artists	SongKong artists
ID3v2	TXXX:Artists	TXXX:ARTISTS
Vorbis	ARTISTS	ARTISTS
APEv2	Artists	ARTISTS
iTunes MP4	----:com.apple.iTunes:ARTISTS	----:com.apple.iTunes:ARTISTS
ASF/Windows Media	WM/ARTISTS	WM/ARTISTS

SongKong added this field first and uses ARTISTS for all formats, the reasoning behind this was twofold:

1. Keep it simple
2. To solve an issue with dbPoweramp converting fields in different formats ti doesnt recognise. For example with the Picard solution if converting from Mp3 to Vorbis it will convert TXXX:Artists to Artists which is not the case expected whereas with the SongKong method the fieldname and case is the same for all formats.

When Picard added the field it used its sentence case standard for ID3, I can understand why they wanted to do this to keep it consistent with other fields they added such as the MusicBrainz Id fields but it does cause unneccessary complexity.

So although Picard writes this field as TXXX:Artists I think it reads it both TXXX:Artists and the TXXX:ARTISTS field added by SongKong so you end up with seeing two values.

More importantly what does your musicplayer see or does it not use this field anyway?

[paultaylor]

Hi, had a bit of a look at your reports. Summarizing you ran Status Report (Report 2) and then Fix Songs (Report 3) in preview mode against Artists #-D which improved things but still plenty to do , and then ran Fix Songs again (Report 4) getting very similar results.

You then ran Fix Songs (report 5) against your whole collection, with matching existing option changed from Rematch if Only Partial Match to Rematch and Preview unchecked again - this improved things but still plenty to do.

So after running Fix Songs (Report 5) we an see a few things

Basic Metadata

There are a handful of folders missing basic metadata, these are best fixed by manually modifying the data for the listed folders:

• No Basic Metadata found for any songs in 2 folders.
• There are 1 folders containing songs with no Album field
• There are 4 folders containing songs with different values for the Album field
• There are 3 folders containing songs with different values for the Album Artist field
• There are 1 folders containing songs with no Artist field

MusicBrainz:Split Folders

Looking at MusicBrainz Ids grouped by folder we see there are 36 folders with their songs split between a mix of different MusicBrainz albums these mostly fall into two categories, one where one song has been matched incorrectly to a different album or folders where you have duplicate songs.

I think the easiest way to fix these is go through them one folder at a time and delete the duplicate tracks where there are duplicates or use Match to One release task to force a match to a single album

MusicBrainz:Multiple Albums

Under MusicBrainz:Multiple Albums you just have one album where you have two copies so you may want to delete one copy.

MusicBrainz:Split Albums

Under MusicBrainz:Split Albums there are 28 albums where we have multiple releaseids for the same album name. Many of these seem to be compilations that i would ignore for now and the original albums ones are often already listed under MusicBrainz:Split Folders so should already be dealt with earlier.

One Song Matched / Songs Missing

Now this is the real issue, it groups your songs by the MusicBrainz release they were matched to and then looks for MusicBrainz releases that have only been partially matched.

Using the 2 Brothers on the 4th Floor artist as an example, we see two albums with 4 and 2 songs matched

and two albums with one song matched

Now looking at the earlier Status Report showing the situation before using SongKong we can see that Picard has already matched songs to different albums, and put into folders matching to these albums. So there is nothing left in the songs to help match to the right albums, remember songs can be on multiple albums.

So, this would be my suggestion to sort out the mess, go down the list of artists listed in the Songs Missing list, and move all songs for that artist into a single folder without subfolder. for example put all the songs in /Volumes/music-general/Artists #-D/2 Brothers on the 4th Floor directly into that folder, whilst making exceptions for artists where you already have complete albums by them.

Then run Fix Songs again, and this should allow SongKong to match some of these folders to single album.

The bigger problem maybe when songs have already been matched to Various Artists albums, do you know what which of these were Various Artist albums you actually had and which are albums that have been incorrectly matched to?

For example for 2 Brothers on the 4th Floor they also have songs matched to 538 Dance Smash Hits 1996, Volume 3 and All Stars 1999

[xbmcgotham]

Thanks so much for your time and detailed analyses! Really appreciated!

I was wondering, is it not possible and easier to have songkong remove all tags and meta data from the mp3 files it can successfully match and retag, and after that is done, run songkong again to identify, without removing any tags, the songs that are not matched and try to fix these afterwards?

[paultaylor]

@xbmcgotham

I was wondering, is it not possible and easier to have songkong remove all tags and meta data from the mp3 files it can successfully match and retag

I dont follow, why would you want to remove tags from files successfully matched, if by successfully matched you mean matched to the right thing, or if you mean matched to the wrong thing not so easy to differentiate between the two.

But it would not help so much anyway, the key issue is that the messed up songs are now in folders representing the incorrect match so if you were to simply remove the metadata but not change the folder structure then the folder structure would push SongKong to rematching against an album that matches the folder name , i.e the wrong album

And just to be clear if you were to remove folder structure entirely so there was no context that would be a complete disaster because then SongKong would not know which album to match a song to, most songs are available on multiple albums so you need the context to match to the right album.

So you need to do some manual work to rescue this, but not that much work. Maybe just try putting the first few artists listed in the Songs Missing tab with incomplete albums into their own single artist folders (*NSYNC, 2 Brothers on the Floor, 2 Unlimited etc) and running Fix Songs against them to see if it fixes it.

In theory Rename Files task could be used to restructure songs into Artist folders but I dont recommend this at the moment because you dont want to do this for songs that have already been matched to the right album(s) as that could break stuff that is already fixed.

[xbmcgotham]

Ahh, ok, I follow. I will start doing the suggested steps you recommended and will report back the results. Have a nice easter.

[xbmcgotham]

Hi @paultaylor, I have worked on the Split Folders and Multiple Albums.

The Split Albums I have sorted and made sure the file are now correct, as for the Multiple Albums, that is strange as the folder it self shows only 1 file per song. There is no duplicate album. There are 2 albums in the folder, both with different names and songs. I guess I can ignore this.

I looked at the Songs Missing. I think this is not an issue as it is correct that I will have many songs missing from albums as I only had single songs and the previous tools auto created the albums for these songs. So am I correct in saying that in this case the songs missing is not important to fix as the files/songs mentioned I probably sont have anyway.

[paultaylor]

@xbmcgotham

as for the Multiple Albums, that is strange as the folder it self shows only 1 file per song. There is no duplicate album. There are 2 albums in the folder, both with different names and songs. I guess I can ignore this.

Hi, if you mean Basic Inconistencies:Multiple Values for Album Field then they should be fixed in each case either the metadata is incorrect as they are all on one album

e.g

Its clear that Artist and Album should be fixed for track 15

or they are two albums and should be in two folders

If you mean MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Split Albums this is what I see, an mp3 and wma version of same album, do you not see that ?

@xbmcgotham

I looked at the Songs Missing. I think this is not an issue as it is correct that I will have many songs missing from albums as I only had single songs and the previous tools auto created the albums for these songs. So am I correct in saying that in this case the songs missing is not important to fix as the files/songs mentioned I probably sont have anyway.

I re-read your original post, I had thought you originally had albums and then other tools had broken them up, I didn’t realize that you had started with indvidual songs and then wanted them to be organzed in as few as albums as possible.

There is a way we can try and do that, and sort them so they are matched to original albums rather than the many Various Artist compilations you have now, but it won’t work so well if you have songs by an artist that are not actually in one album but multiple albums, and you already have some complete albums.

But since you started with a bit of a mess this is what I would do since it requires minimum manual effort and should improve things.

Reorganize files by Artist (not Album Artist) without album folder so we have songs by each artist in their own folder (Note the new folder structure is temporary once the metadata is better we can put it back into #-D etc later) as follows:

• Select Rename Files task with Default profile
• On Basic tab disable Preview Only
• On Rename Files tab set Rename Files based on metadata to Yes if has metadata
• On Rename Files tab set Rename mask and Compilation mask to Artist/Title
• Select Start

Then run Fix Songs to try and match songs for each artist to an album as follows:

• On Basic tab disable Preview Only
• On Basic tab set For Songs already fully matched set to Rematch
• Select Start

Then run Create Support Files so we can review results and see where we are at.

[xbmcgotham]

Hi, sorry, I think I looked at a folder that I had already fixed and this reason I did not see the files mentioned in Split Albums.

As for the new approach, just to verify. Most of the songs that are there came from single song files without a complete album. Some albums I have are (still) complete albums with many artists in a compilation like for example Top 40 compilations or certain DJ’s, but I also have full complete artists albums. If I perform these steps, what would happen to these “complete” albums? Any way to protect these from changes?

[paultaylor]

@xbmcgotham

As for the new approach, just to verify. Most of the songs that are there came from single song files without a complete album. Some albums I have are (still) complete albums with many artists in a compilation like for example Top 40 compilations or certain DJ’s, but I also have full complete artists albums. If I perform these steps, what would happen to these “complete” albums? Any way to protect these from changes?

So I originally thought this was the case which is why I originally recommended manually grouping songs directly under artists listed in the Songs Missing list. But his is a bit laborious so when you said

@xbmcgotham

I think this is not an issue as it is correct that I will have many songs missing from albums as I only had single songs and the previous tools auto created the albums for these songs

I suggested the new more automated method

But this method organizes songs by artist rather than album artist, so if the large list of various artists albums songs are currently matched to include albums that you actually have it would mess these up because the songs would be grouped by the track artist rather than by various artist.

Okay so I propose a slightly modification to this, identify the already fully matched albums and move them to a safe place then process the remainder, you only have 332 fully matched MusicBrainz albums so should not take that long.

Move already matched albums to another location:

• Open Fix Song Report 5 (or later report applied against all songs if have one)
• Select Matched:Match to MusicBrainz Release
• Set Matched to Album Filter to With Full Album Match
• This should now just show artists that have fully matched albums, move these artists to a new location
• Set Matched to Album Filter back to No Filter
• Select the Various Artists artist
• Set Matched to Album Filter to With Full Album Match
• This should now just show compilations that have fully matched albums, move these albums to a new location

Now repeat the process Matched:Match to Discogs Release because there may be some albums not matched to MusicBrainz only matched to Discogs

Then do a scan of what is left as you may have some complete albums not matched to either

Then follow earlier advice to rename the remaining files and run Fix Songs

BTW I do have this open issue that would make it simpler to move fully matched albums but this is not implemented yet.

[xbmcgotham]

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I am going to dig more into your recommended steps and let you know how it went. Thanks again.