Cover Art: Ignore source (original album) of song

[mbc]

Hi guys.

I have some songs. Originally they have been ripped of a compilation (Bravo Hits, …) with different songs from different artists mixed together on that one disc. So my resulting cover art is exactly about this disc. Basically I would prefer to have the cover from the artits, by its album, or better, its single of this song. Is it possible to force Songkong to look only at covers from this artsits albums, or singles? Since they are tagged, it should be possible to extract the name of the artist and the name of the song and check, if a single or album cover is available and take this one instead.

BTW: Is it possible to always use the artist album instead of compilations, no matter of what disc it have been released?

Best regards
Marco

[paultaylor]

Hi, by default SongKong tries to group songs by their metadata/folder to match whole albums and only allow match if all songs in grouping could be matched to one album. However in Fix Songs if you disable Only allow match if all songs in grouping match to one album on the Basic tab that restriction is removed and it can match individual songs to original albums or singles.

If they have already been matched you would also need to change For songs already fully matched to Rematch to change the match. If it is still matching to compilations then you need to run Metagrater to remove the bad metadata (album artist, album, track no, disc no etc )

then retry Fix Songs

Cover art is always linked to the matching release (album/single) so to get to the right artwork you need to match to the right release, you can also use Match To One Album task to force a match to a particular release.

[mbc]

Thank you very much for your response, I really appreciate you took some time to do a little tutorial!
But I am sorry to say, having some really bad response to this.

First, I removed all existing tags and covers (at least I thought I did this) with that Meta Grater:

But I get left with that:
Cover is still present, and Songkong ID ist still present too.

Meta Grater does not offer a field for “Songkong ID”, so this might not be a bug (still being inside the mp3 file), but since I could not find out, if Songkong reuses this field for something else, it is not removable within Songkong itself. But covers had to be removed, so I think this is still a bug.

So I used a second software to remove those.
Then I refixed those songs with these settings:

Now I am getting this:

Those are different songs, all in the same directory, filenames are still correct, but Songkong matched all songs to ABBA, cover is exact the same in all those files (from ABBA).

Refix them with different settings results still in the same problem.
I had to delete database to get rid of this.
After removing database I did a new try with these settings, as you described an deactivated:

Now get this:

The same as before … Various Artists from compilations.
So Songkong still matches those songs to compilations.
I also recognized, there are mostly 2 covers. First cover is from compilation, second is mostly a picture of the artist or group, so this comes close to my wishes, but still beeing second cover and not at first.

Why does it still rematch (refix) to compilations? I guess it is the Acoustic ID which leads to those compilation.
This might be fine to me, if there is a function to “redirect” to some artists single or album, since the name of the artist and title is valid. And since there are only 7 songs in my test, a match should never be given, because all those matched compilations have more as only 7 songs, so I do not understand what songkong is matching. So I have a big problem with Album-Artist and Album …

Covers from compilations are not the first or best choise. I think many people are not interested if those song came from some compilation, there should be a function to switch between “real mode” (compilation) and “fake mode” (song captured from compilation, but tagged like being from artist-single, or at least artist-album).

So with my problem I still encountered 3 bugs to me

1. Meta Grater not removing Songkong ID (has been inserted by Songkong before)
2. Meta Grater not removing Front Cover (has been inserted by Songkong before)
3. Fixing songs ends up in a total database mess.
   (4). Songs are still matched to compilations, while Artist and Title are available and could be matched with Singles or Albums instead.

[paultaylor]

Hi, okay I did say just remove certain fields with metagrater not all fields! The idea being you want to remove the fields that link it to the wrong album such as album field but keep the fields that help identify the song and would be same for original album and compilations eg title.

1. SONGKONG_ID cannot be removed, it is necessary for correct working of SongKong and does not cause a problem for you.
2. But if embedded Front Cover artwork is not being removed that is a bug that I will check
3. By removing all the metadata SongKong only has Acoustids (that can match multiple songs) and the existing folder structure to work with. If you have a backup I would go back to this and only remove some of the metadata, if you do not please run Create Support Files so I can better understand the situation.

[paultaylor]

Hi, unfortunately for some reason your support files appear corrupted, I cannot open them. Perhaps you could send them manually , what platform are you using?

[mbc]

I am using Windows 10.
I stopped creating support files and restarted it a bit later on. It went much faster above the part that has been processed while the first run.

[paultaylor]

I received twice but both files corrupted, can you try again and leave it (perhaps run overnight)