Hi! I’ve been testing the SongKong trial and it’s nearly everything I want except the “original year” data is track-based instead of album-based. The desired “original year” field would be the original release year of the album
(Currently, the “year” field refers to the release of the edition of the album that the files were ripped from, which is the expected and desired behavior.)
Any way to fix this?
Thanks!
Interesting point, I have made a note of it - https://jthink.atlassian.net/browse/SONGKONG-1715 but I do not have a solution since customers usually want the earliest release date of the track. This is particularly the case with compilation albums such as the Now thats what I call Music series, here it is clear that users want the orginal release date of the individual tracks not of the compilation album.
Maybe the rules should be different when looking at an original album, I can see your logic here. Need views from others, maybe need another option ?
Thank you for your response! I understand why it behaves the way it does now.
I guess this is more of a feature request:
What I want is to have directories with a naming pattern like
albumartist - originalyear (year) - album
Eg, David Bowie ? 1977 (2017) ?�Low
(where Low was released in 1977 but the rip I have on my harddrive is from the 2017 release)
The problem I am having with the originalyear as it works now is that I wind up with certain albums that have tracks with different originalyears, so the album gets split up in different directories based on each track’s originalyear (even on non-compilation albums!).
Anyway, thanks for all of your work! Jaikoz has been a lifesaver, and I love being able to write Javascript for the filename masks. I’m looking forward to integrating SongKong into my music organization workflow ?�the two applications seem like they’ll work really well together, with Jaikoz as the tool to clean up the albums that SongKong can’t match.
I understand this would be a lot of work, but my dream would be an extended interface for the filename masks so we could use the musicbrainz/discogs id to make and parse our own queries.
[quote=porphyrin]
I understand this would be a lot of work, but my dream would be an extended interface for the filename masks so we could use the musicbrainz/discogs id to make and parse our own queries.[/quote]
Could you elaborate on this idea please ?
Sure!
I haven’t thought through this on an interface level, but the gist is that to me, as a coder, there’s an immense amount of value in SongKong between its analysis, its logs (and its ability to undo changes), its metadata handling, its methods for song and album identification, etc, etc, but at the end of the day, I wish I could just work with the raw query responses myself and make further queries if desired.
It also comes from a place of understanding that, from your perspective, you can’t make the program perfect for every user ? it’d be an impossible amount of work for you and the quantity of options in SongKong would make its configuration overwhelming for its users ? so allowing for more of a plugin-type structure could allow users to bridge those gaps themselves (Yate & beets.io do that quite successfully, but I’m trying to make SongKong work for me because it feels much safer to run on automatic mode on my 60k+ file music library).
I’m just brainstorming ways for me and other people like me to be able to DIY their solutions with SongKong.
The completely bonkers solution would be a licensing model similar to UnrealEngine where users get source access and updates for the duration of their license, but I understand that that’s a different business model and exposes you to much more & different types of risk as a developer.
So in Jaikoz/SongKong you add metadata, and then filenames can be configured based on metadata, so as long as you have the metadata javascript gives you alot of power regarding creating filenames.
So do you mean create Filenames directly from MusicBrainz, bypassing metadata stored in files ?
Or do you mean other ways of getting metadata from MusicBrainz to put into Metadata fields, thing to note is that the SongKong/jaikoz matching algorithms are far more complex than the simple matching provided by beets and will get more reliable results and more matches.
Or do you mean something else ?
Exactly. I have found that SongKong/Jaikoz does a much better job of matching than beets et al – it’s best in class by far. I’m saying I want to be able to piggyback off of SongKong’s matching to get metadata from MusicBrainz/discogs to map to fields in the file rename mask and in the file tags.
Thanks, btw, for talking through this with me.
Can you give me some examples of extra data you would like to add from MusicBrainz that SongKong/Jaikoz doesnt currently get, that would help me.
Going back to the original subject: Re:Album-based original year?
There is mask field “Original Release Year” = originalyear
Is that for the Album, or for the song only?
If it is not for the Album, is a mask field available for Album Original Release Year ? Can one be created?
its currently song based, the earliest year the song was released, which is often the same thing when the song is on an original album (unless it was a single), but is a very different thing if the song is on a compilation album.
An issue has already been raised about this, but Im not sure on the best solution yet.
I am slowly understanding some basics. Is this correct?:
All metadata, including album based, is contained in the song files. There are no “album files” to contain any metadata. Albums are only folder structures.
The field “year” is the album release year, and is in the metadata of each song, but since it is identical for all songs from the album, it can safely be used in the album folder name. By “safely” I mean it will only create one album folder, as opposed to many folders due to many values for “year”.
If 2) is true, then most people may feel that “year” in the album folder is sufficient and is not needed in the song file name.
4)there is no field named “ReleaseYear”. Instead is is called “year”.
Yes all correct, (but if the Format/Use Original Release Date is enabled then 2> doesnt hold)
Thanks again for following up. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help! I don’t have too many albums (percentage-wise) that this applies to, so I think I’ll get SongKong anyway (I trust its magic given how much Jaikoz has helped me), but I’d still really like to be able to tag and organize my library like this at some point 
I understand the issue and will devise a fix for this within the next few months.