Hello
In my case, lot’s of classical music, in most cases SongKong confuses artist and composers. Mostly, the it puts the composer in both fields of leaves the artist field blank.
I used SongKong with the given preferences. Anything I could change?
Thank you.
Ulrich
Hi Ulrich
Yes, Classical Music is difficult, and some users want the artist to be the composer others the orchestra. I dont have a solution for always getting the right thing in these fields at the moment but I plan in the next release to at least let you tell SONGKONG to leave these fields alone, see
https://jthink.atlassian.net/browse/SONGKONG-930
but Im not aware of SongKong currently ever leaving the artist field blank if it finds a match.
Hello
Thanks for you reply.
Yes, there are different opinions about that, that is fine. An example of my problem: Glenn Gould playing Bach: In Audirvana I see Bach in the field composer and artist. The name of Glenn Gould does not appear anywhere! What means, I can’t even put up a smart playlist with his name.
Herzliche Gr�sse Ulrich
Do you have a link to the MusicBrainz (or Dicogs) release these songs have been matched to
The latest release does go some way to address this in that you can instruct SongKong not to update Artist/Composer/Album Artist/Conductor fields if you have entered a special usage for these files.
Could we have a separate Rename Mask for music that SongKong identifies as classical? Or an isclassical switch for the rename masks?
Although I don’t think Musicbrainz is consistent - it looks like the “Release Artist” can be “Johann Sebastian Bach; Glenn Gould” or “Glenn Gould” or “Bach” or “Bach; Glenn Gould”. Release Group Artist can be “Johann Sebastian Bach” or “Bach; Glenn Gould”. Now I’m confused.
An isclassical variable should have been there, that was an omission that I have now fixed for new release within a couple of weeks (then I work on adding all these new fields to Jaikoz), for now I don’t think a separate classical rename mask is required, as that would necessitate a Various Artist Classical Mask and so on.
MusicBrainz Release Artist tends to reflect whatever is written on the cover. One improvement I have added for next release is the option to remove the Composer from the AlbumArtist (as stored in Composer field anyway), I would be interested in knowing if this would be useful for you and other improvements that you require.
The original issue on this thread was about (track) artist, now as long as SongKong 4.0 successfully identifies a track as classical it will now add the performers to the artist field by default rather than adding the composer to the artist field.
Also, note Ive started a series of blog posts about Classical music and SongKong, please share http://blog.jthink.net/2016/09/tagging-classical-musicpart-i-track.html
Hi, thanks for responding.
To carry on with the same example, I would want to have all Bach, J.S. albums together, and then within that, I would want to have all Bach albums by Glenn Gould together.
If you mean you can subtract the Composer value from the AlbumArtist field, to perhaps get a more usable Album Artist value, great. If I can have ?Gould, Glenn? as Album Artist and ?Bach, J. S.? (or some standard form) as Composer, then it seems that by renaming or sorting I can do anything.
A quick look at a few recordings shows Musicbrainz doing things that you?re well aware of but I?m just starting to peer into and I may not be doing it right at all; please pardon my hubris and my thinking out loud:
Track Artist: For a solo album, performer; for an orchestral recording, can be orchestra-conductor-soloist or conductor-orchestra or soloists-orchestra or conductor
Composer: Varying versions of the composer?s name. Sometimes not included at all. Sometimes the composer?s name appears only in the album title.
Album Artist: For solo albums, the performer or the composer. For orchestral, the composer. Sometimes left out so that the composer?s name appears only in the album title.
It seems like for solo albums, if all tracks have the same Artist, taking the composer out of Album Artist and putting the Artist into Album Artist would usually work. If the composer isn?t in Album Artist, leave it alone, maybe it?s the performer.
For orchestral recordings, if all tracks have the same Artist, removing the composer from Album Artist and putting the contents of Artist into Album Artist would still be helpful. And putting the performers into the artist field instead of the composer, as you say, is good.
Thank you for an isclassical variable. This raises the question of how elaborate the rename masks can be - could I branch on the value of isclassical and then do completely different things for classical and nonclassical recordings?
[quote=billfish]Hi, thanks for responding.
To carry on with the same example, I would want to have all Bach, J.S. albums together, and then within that, I would want to have all Bach albums by Glenn Gould together.
If you mean you can subtract the Composer value from the AlbumArtist field, to perhaps get a more usable Album Artist value, great. If I can have ?Gould, Glenn? as Album Artist and ?Bach, J. S.? (or some standard form) as Composer, then it seems that by renaming or sorting I can do anything.
[/quote]
Yes this is done for next release which will be next week at the latest.
The MusicBrainz guidelines mean are that composer should always be stored as TrackArtist, and performers should be stored for RecordingArtist. So you are generally correct if talking about recording artist not track artist but the guidelines are not fully adhered to so SongKong constructs its own TrackArtist based on User options, RecordingArtist,TrackArtist and Recording relations.
Usually it is included as TrackArtist, and often as a Composer relationship as well. The problem is usually the other way round that the composer is credited but the performers/musicians are not.
It should be Composers; Main Performers, Orchestra/Choir/Ensemble/Conductors
Just pick the preferred TrackArtist format in SongKong and let SongKong worry about constructing the desired TrackArtist, note that the new version works better than the current v4.
[quote=billfish]
Thank you for an isclassical variable. This raises the question of how elaborate the rename masks can be - could I branch on the value of isclassical and then do completely different things for classical and non-classical recordings?[/quote]
Yes, you will be able to in next release.
Yay! 
Hello, Paul. How are you?
And now, the latest release can improve my view of composers? I would repass songkong in all my about 6 thousand cds in case it puts more composers instead of instrumentists for my classification…
I saw I can remove those long lists of artists, which helps…
Hi, best to rerun and then if any results you dont like we can discuss.
Long time I don’t use it; some suggestion for emphasizing composer? and remove long artist lists
I also would like to put all incomplete albums in a separate folder
Hi, not sure what you want but I summarize situation here.
All songs can have ALBUM, TITLE, ALBUMARTIST, ARTIST and COMPOSER fields, the ALBUMARTIST field must always be the same for all tracks on the ALBUM to keep them together.
For Classical SongKong usually adds the main performers for the whole album in the ALBUMARTIST field, i.e conductor, soloist, orchestra, as it is in MusicBrainz although we now limit the number of performers if there are many.
Composers are added to the COMPOSER field
ARTIST contains by default the main performers for the track i.e conductor, soloist, orchestra but you can change this via the Track Artist field on the Classical tab
Renaming/Moving files is now a separate Rename Files task, I would first get the metadata correct before moving files
Thank you! I will try this first then.
Hello, good morning! I ran the metadata update; now?
http://localhost:4567/FixSongsReport00127/FixSongsReport00127.html?init=1
That link doesn’t work, you need to simply run Create Support Files from Admin menu and them they will get sent to my server.
That was just to show that it ran with almost 100% album recognition!! (is that so?); now I would like to do the composer versus artist change
That just means that most songs have a value in the album field. They may already have had that value, the barchart above which shows Matched to MusicBrainz or Matched to Discogs show how many songs have actually been matched to an album by SongKong.
