Greetings. Just purchased SongKong a couple of days ago, and so far I’m pretty pleased.
I’ve been a Picard user for years (and MP3TAG when forced to), but have gotten tired of using Picard for tagging thousands of albums at a time.
My only complaint thus far is how artwork is handled.
First off, I’d very much like an option to save covers as folder.jpg only and not embed the covers into the files. I’ve read the explanation on the website as to why this behaviour occurs by default (for convenience in copying to portable devices) – but this is not something I require (I use Plex exclusively for music, so it automatically handles artwork for my devices, whether I’m syncing the files to the device or just streaming them). Having the artwork embedded can be an inconvenience. Many programs (including Plex, which is why it is an issue for me) prioritize embedded artwork over folder.jpg. I like to use first Kodi to find better covers (using the CD Art Manager Add on) to automatically (and accurately) pull covers from Fanart.TV (I don’t actually use Kodi, I only use it for the CD Art Manager Add on). Then I use Album Art Downloader to get any missing covers and upgrade the lowest quality ones. But because both only save the covers as folder.jpg, the new covers won’t show in Plex (as it’ll prefer the embedded ones). Sure I can use MP3TAG to then embed all those covers into the files, but it’s an extra step, and doesn’t always work (sometimes fails because the art is too big, sometimes other reasons). And not to mention that step takes a day on 6000 albums. Managing the artwork is much easier when there’s no embedded art at all. Would be lovely to have an option to not embed (can still be the default to embed, just let users like me tick a box to disable it). Plex isn’t alone in this behaviour – after some googling it appears many programs prioritize embedded art to the folder.jpg.
It would be really awesome if SongKong could use Fanart.Tv directly. There’s no higher quality source out – and it’s pretty heavily moderated, so poor quality images get trashed quickly. Best of all its API uses Musicbrainz IDs already, so the look ups would be relatively easy for SongKong to do. http://docs.fanarttv.apiary.io/
It would be nice also, if SongKong prioritized square images first (allowing a small percentage of deviance – to allow for example 498 x 500 images from being discounted), then prioritize by resolution. There’s a lot of high resolution images out there that are actually much worse than the lower resolution images (badly cropped to rectangles, spine included with the cover, both front and back cover scanned together), preferring square images over rectangles would automatically get rid of a lot of the badly scanned high res images.
