Artwork and SongKong

[Endosmok]

So I am trying to figure out how this works…

When I ran SongKong on a directory of some music, I could see that it created empty files that look something like Artist - Song -dslkfjds2345asdflj.new

I am assuming it is a place holder for a location referenced elsewhere?

Now going thru the logs I can see a folder called images with image names similiar to those referenced above.

Are they connected?

If so, is there a cleaner way of doing this?

Or would I just not select the Artwork option in SongKong and use something else to gather artwork?

I’d much rather just have the jpgs in the album folder itself.

Lastly, I only ran SongKong on a small portion of my mp3 collection, yet the DB is about 500MB and Images about 300MB, I am worried about the amount of space which may incur if I do scan my entire collection.

If there is a workaround for the Artwork cleanup using SongKong, do I need to reinstall SongKong if I wanted the location elsewhere?

For example, I did the standard install, but that went to a 120GB SSD drive. Would I have to reinstall to move the DB and Artwork to a different location?

Thanks

[paultaylor]

Hi, slightly confused do you have a trial or full version of SongKong, I ask because files of that form would only be created when you save changes to your songs and they cant be saved with the trial. What happens when files are saved is sometimes the file can be modified directly , sometimes we take a copy , write to the new file , then delete the original file and rename. How we do this depends on the file format and hoe muvh metadata is changing, but there shouldn’t be any .new files left at the end of it.

Seperately to that we create a detailed html report detailing exactly what has been matched and what has been changed, as part of that we display thumbnails to any coverart that has been added together with a link to the original artwork at its original size. So this artwork needs to be stored somewhere and it is stored with the reports.

When we match artwork we actually embed it into the music file itself, this is much more portable than storing artwork on the filesystem, the images folder is ONLY there for the reports. Having said that I have had a request from someone to write the artwork as a file in the songs folders http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-166 (like your request below) so maye I could do something cleverer here but could get messy. I’m coming from the point of view that diskspace is cheap, and if you have a large music collection you probably have a reasonable amount of disk space. But the eimages are only used for the reports so you could delete them (and the reports) without harming your songs, but perhaps I should add something within SongKong to make this easier ?

Similarly the Database is used to:

Cache data from Musicbrainz and Discogs so we dont have to get it more than once for good performance.
Store song details, so low memory footproint and best peformance
Store song changed details so customer can rollback changes

You can empty the database ( File:Empty Database) to reclaim space if you have finished processing your songs and are happy with the results. Unlike iTunes all the metadata found is stored in the file the database is just there for the reasons listed above. Again the reasoning is that diskspace is cheap and plentiful whereas memory is not.

There is currently no way to change where the database and logs are stored, but you would not break the installation if you deleted these folders SongKong would just recreate on next startup.

I hope this clarifies things.

[Endosmok]

Ok… this does clear some things up. I am running the FULL version, but I think I know why these .new files are being created.

Currently my music files reside on a WHS 2011 Server using FLEXRAID for parity and drive pooling. To Windows my drive pool looks like 1 big 10TB local drive. I am logged on directly on to the server as Administrator and running SongKong as Administrator as well, but for some reason (which I have yet to figure out) I was getting errors on all the music files and SongKong reported that it was not able to modify the files. Which was correct. I do have the Music folder network shared, but again I am accessing it directly as a local drive when running Songkong. I checked permissions and uncheck read only and applied to all file but yet the problem persists. It could be that I just don’t know what I am doing with Windows drives and shares too Maybe something simple will fix it, but I don’t have issues with other programs making modifications to the same files as I do with SongKong.

Here’s the thing though, I only get this error using SongKong so far. I have used Picard and Magic MP3 Tagger and they both can modify files in the same location where SongKong tries and fails.

I am not sure where I am going wrong yet. Frustrating to say the least but I know it has to be something simple.

[paultaylor]

There was a regression introduced into SongKong 1.3 which prevented saving of mp4 files, so if you are using mp4s please try updating to the new 1.3.1 version.

Or could the difference could be that you have permission setup to modify files but not create/delete files. SongKong needs this ability for the reasons described, maybe Picard does not.

If that doesn’t fix things can you email support@jthink.net your support files (Help/Create Support Files)

[Endosmok]

[quote=paultaylor]There was a regression introduced into SongKong 1.3 which prevented saving of mp4 files, so if you are using mp4s please try updating to the new 1.3.1 version.

Or could the difference could be that you have permission setup to modify files but not create/delete files. SongKong needs this ability for the reasons described, maybe Picard does not.

If that doesn’t fix things can you email support@jthink.net your support files (Help/Create Support Files) [/quote]

Thanks for the quick reply. I am only using mp3 and do have 1.3.1 installed. I still haven’t figured it out though. I just tested the latest version of MP3Tag and make sure I was able to directly modify the tag and save. Worked fine.

I also moved the files to another drive that is not part of the network share and it worked fine with SongKong. It’s definitely a permissions issue with this drive, but I am accessing directly as a local drive with Admin account and UAC turned off does nothing to cure my woes. Admin account has FULL CONTROL and is owner of the folders in question. I’m not saying it’s a SongKong issue at all but this is my first time running into a permissions issue with any program on my drives so far accessing them directly and therefore the solution is not popping into my head at the moment. I am running out of ideas at the moment, so anyone with suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Now I thought, well I could just move everything over to the non shared drive, let SongKong run it’s magic then move them back over, but I believe the issue would still occur later and of course if I am monitoring folders with SongKong same thing would occur.

I’ll send you the last log in email.

Update: I found a workaround that seems to work, i’m sure isolated issue with my setup.

[paultaylor]

Could the problem be similar to http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-236