sorry me again! 
so i was just reviewing some of the changes songkong made to my mp3s. just fixing tags only, no rename as suggested. I’m noticing duplicate date fields. Is it possible remove such duplicates at all? It would save time on manually correcting it!
I suppose on somewhat of the same topic is it possible to enforce consistency on tags such as disc number or track number.
I seem to have mixed disc numbers
01/01
1/1
I expect they are different fields, and it is just the tool you are using that is labelling them both as Date, look in your SongKong Fix Songs Report or run a Status Report to see what they actually are.
The difference is probably between Matched and Unmatched, all songs matched to an album should use consistent format
Ah yes you are correct. there is album year, original year, etc
Ok so just to clarify. My settings are as follows.
and
and
and
So I have it setup so matched albums move to a success folder and unmatched to a fail folder. I assume that the following settings would mean that only fully matched albums would move to success?
The success folder is the only one that I check with kid3 (my tag viewer) at the moment, so there should be no unmatched songs?
Best
That does seem correct, can you give me an example of two albums in the matched folder where this is a problem and perhaps run Status Report on them
And one last question if i may. sorry to not open another thread, but it seemd redundant to paste my setting sin again. I also noticed that some albums in the success folder have inconsistent artist field names and I need to manually bulk correct these so that the artist is the same. I thought these settings would prevent that?
Best
thanks very much! I will send you examples of the above later todays
Again, that should be the case so please send examples
ok just sent you examples of artist name not respected. link expires on sun.
best
I have the last report with 1,700 files on it, but I dont know which artist to look at?
But I looked at View in Spreadsheet report and everything in the newly matched folder appeared okay except for mp4s, but this is limitation of mp4s, for this format the discno/trackno is a number not a text field and so cannot be padded, is this the problem ?
Hi,
The explanation on m4a padding is probably why I saw non-zero track disc number padding. However, the examples I sent were regarding artist name. I also sent an email to support with a link to two example albums where artist name was not respected.
The two albums were:
Best
There was no links in that email
apologies! resent
Okay I have looked at Everlast, I can see the problem but quite difficult to explain
The issue you are seeing is that track 14 was credited to Everlast feat Carlos Santana and so you wanted it to just store Everlast for track artist
The problem is (as you can see on second screenshot) that the underlying recording that this track is a version of is credited to Santana featuring Everlast (i.e the other way round)
So because you Use standard ArtistName instead of name on cover enabled we look at the underlying recording rather than the track, and then because you had When tracks contained featured artists set to just keep the main artist it then would pickup Santana as the main artist.
Now this option has two effects, the one explained above and the much more common issue whereby if track is credited to particular person it will use the same name for that artist, i,.e always use Prince rather than his various other names
So I have to consider between the following
Would be interested in your thoughts
Its essentially same problem for Frank Zappa, but his songs are sometimes credited Frank Zappa, sometimes Mothers of Invention and sometimes both, its difficult.
Hi,
Thanks for the thorough investigation! It does not seem to be an easy solution. From my point of view, I would want uniformity in the artist name as that is how i would sort my albums folder wise. However, I’m unsure of what your other customers would prefer.
From looking at what songkong has done so far and taking into consideration that it is meant to be a somewhat automated solution, I would think
You could have a lot of different options available, but would people get a consistent experience when tagging a large number of mp3’s? If I am the first person who brought this up, it would seem that this issue is relatively rare? Even in my case, the issue crops up for ~3 albums in 50
It doesn’t hurt to have those extra options I suppose, but it would be more useful to have an alerting feature for bulk editing IMO. The current html output is good for rich detail, but it is not so good for getting an overview on the tagging operations.
I have a large collection and:
I note that the main things I have to rectify are:
Possible solutions:
Perhaps a bit trickier to handle, but it would be good if the song kong output for that particular album had a list of links for possible alternative candidates. that way if an issue was detected, the tags from an alt musicbrainz or discog url could be used to rectify the tags easily.
This is an easier solution. I actually wrote a dirty python script to do check if a folder of songs has non-uniform artis fields. Allow the user to set certain fields as “fixed”. So if I set the artist field to be fixed, songkong analyses all the songs in that folder and if the majority say everlast, but 1 is set to santana, the santana one is written over.
Of course this assumes that each folder represents an album. A more sophisticated version could “fix” by album tag. but, personally, i would be happy with the more basic implementation.
Best
Is there a way to get songkong to look at just the folder name in a more granular fashion? That is often correct for my use case, but I elect to not using my existing tags as they usually no that great.
Okay so the Patti Smith issue will be resolved by a bug fix, and I think if I simplify Is Use Artist Name option to only do the Prince fix then that will work for Track artist problem.
Although worth noting with albums the important thing is the Album Artist is consistent for album, its not wrong for Track Artist to vary. So you should be using album artist to sort your folders not track artist.
For when it matches wrong album (Faith No More issue) the solution will be a single album matcher that lets you review changes and force match to particular release.
All these fixes and improvements should come within the next couple of releases
The improvements to the reports you mentioned may be better if added to the Status Report.
