Hi all, I run SK and a large and very messy collection of tracks last night and three immediate questions / issues arose!
HTML shows a ton of these: Apr 26, 2018 10:12:50 PM:Unknown Error
What are they? Broken tracks?
I set SK to copy the tracks to a new folder, which it did. But the messy folder structure remained the same! I had unticked ‘rename file part only’ but that didn’t seem to work!
A lot of albums still remain in the old folder… I guess these are just unmatched?
Thanks!
[quote=rendez2k]Hi all, I run SK and a large and very messy collection of tracks last night and three immediate questions / issues arose!
Did you have Rename Filename from Metadata configured on the first tab, by default it is set to No.
Correct, its worth noting that SongKong may have matched the song, but unless it could match the whole group to an album then Move Folder will not move them.
It is worth running again, as usually SongKong can find a few more full albums matches using the extra metadata added first time round for song only matches
Thanks! Was running 5.2 so let me upgrade and re-run 
OK! After 5.3 upgrade, things went a lot smoother (also upgraded to Pro!).
I still have around 600 unmatched tracks. I suspect its because some of them are say vinyl rips. Whats the best way of sorting those out? I assume this is where Jaikoz needs to come (which I also own!)
Did it manage a Song Only Match for most of the 600, if so you could
Use the new Edit Songs task or Jaikoz to improve the metadata, then rerun
Or Uncheck (at your own risk) Only allow match if all Songs in Grouping Match to One Album, that would allow SongKong to associate the song with an album, but it may not be your preferred album.
Run Help:Create Support Files this will send me your logs and last few reports, and I will be able to give more insight if I can see these.
But of course if the albums don’t actually exist in the MusicBrainz/Discogs databases then no automatic match is possible.
Thanks! As a first step I’ve just emailed you the log files!
When I get a bit of time later, I’ll check out some of the other options you’ve suggested. Thanks
I had a quick look, there are
5300 fully matched
600 unmatched
400 song only
300 acoustid only
So if you disable Only allow match if all Songs in Grouping Match to One Album that should convert song only to album matched, but some may be wrong album so maybe the best thing would to be run in preview mode first and check the results
I looked at one of the first artists that was unmatched/acoustid only and this was Autechre, and the album was on MusicBrainz (e.g https://musicbrainz.org/release/7d64a467-1c94-4366-a8ad-526918133f08 ). Not sure why it did not match but if you used Jaikoz and Match to Specified Release for some of these releases this should give you some more matches.
Strange: just loaded the first Autechre album into Jaikoz and tried to match it to the release on Discogs but it fails?
Very odd, will investigate further…
Try MusicBrainz.
OK, super confused now! I tried that in Jaikoz and manged to get it to match the release and hit save… Again, SK failed to match.
I then thought I’d try MP3Tag and again, very easily matched to Discogs. Updated the tags… SK failed to match! Its not the end of the world but just odd?
[quote=rendez2k]OK, super confused now! I tried that in Jaikoz and manged to get it to match the release and hit save… Again, SK failed to match.
[/quote]
SongKong doesnt have a match to specific release function, if you specify a release in Jaikoz to match to then that allows Jaikzo to match those tracks to a release using less stringent requirements then when if has to guess a match.
OK but once matched in Jaikoz, shouldn’t it allow SK to match as presumably any problems with say the tags, would have been fixed?
Thats what I was working on, so that SK would go ahead and rename and move all the files once the info was fixed in Jaikoz
Yes if already matched and has the MusicBrainz info then yes that should allow SongKong to move the files. Could you just load that folder, try again and then send me support files so I can take another look.
Done!
Okay I have found the problem
Both Jaikoz and SongKong don’t use MusicBrainz/Discogs directly. Instead they use Albunack, this is designed just for SongKong/Jaikoz music tagging and is therefore much faster and more reliable then using MusicBrainz/Discogs themselves. The disadvantage is that it is only updated (actually has to be rebuilt) once a month so therefore doesnt contain the latest data, and therefore doesn’t include that Autechre album as that was only added on the 9th April.
So how did Jaikoz match it then ?
When you give Jaikoz a MusicBrainz Release Id to match to if it cannot find it then it will fall back to looking it up in the live MusicBrainz database, that is why it could match it.
But SongKong doesnt have this feature, when processed with SongKong it tried to look up the existing release id but failed, for all SongKong knew it could be an invalid MusicBrainz Id, therefore it doesnt mark it as matched to MusicBrainz and therefore doesnt move the folder.
Ideally I should add the MusicBrainz live lookup to SongKong to avoid this issue.
That all makes sense then and thank you for spending the time checking it out. I look forward to any updates in this area
And a simpler fix maybe just to accept (as long as it is in the right format) that if a release has a MusicBrainzReleaseId then it has been matched to a MusicBrainz release even if SongKong cannot find the release.
Also worth noting you can check the Albunack database yourself by looking up by Album Artist
i.e. here is Autechre’s discography
http://artist.albunack.net/410c9baf-5469-44f6-9852-826524b80c61.html
Dear Paul
I have just purchased the Melco license and ran it on my entire collection. Moved the unmatched albums to a separate unmatched folder.
In the unmatched one there are quite a few which are complete and have the entire info in the tags and match an album. Example - Arabesque by Crystal Cables - the entire album with all the tracks in exactly the same order exists on discogs. I have tried to scan this folder separately again. But doesnt move to the matched folder. Right now I still have a lot of files unmatched.
I have a few albums ripped as cue files. I presume SongKong cannot match these or populate the tags of individual files. Presume I need to use cue tools etc to rip them back into separate tracks?
There are many empty folders with files of 1KB - is there no way to have these deleted?
I have uploaded my support files. Grateful for any advice, help please.
Best
NH
So this particular release is not a release by a band called Crystal Cables its a test cd containing various classical tracks used by the Crystal Cables company, as such I could not find it on MusicBrainz or Discogs.
It was possible to match some of the tracks to Acoustid, and because you had no existing metadata SongKong did try and add the most basic song only metadata for these tracks from Acoustid. Unfortunately this unverified data was not so good , and because you set SongKong to rename songs even if only matched song only that has now caused the tracks form that release to get a bit split up.
Better to either not rename at all, or only rename if matched to a release.
No sorry we do not deal with single files containing multiple tracks such as cue files, its not a very flexible format really and I would recommend you don’t use it.
Are these folders that previously contained songs but now empty because moved to unmatched folder. Since you already have For Songs already matched on the Save tab set to Everything this points to an improvement I could make when moving unmatched songs to remove these folders.
But has SongKong matched to MusicBrainz Release or MusicBrainz song, if not they will not be renamed.
When I look at this artist on MusicBrainz, both names seem to be known
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/75f331df-f740-4997-9913-71c6be48594a/aliases
so is it just the case that only some of their songs have been matched, in which case some manual editing may be required.
Many thanks Paul for the detailed response.
On 1 I actually found the exact album on discogs.
So the issue must be something else.
Points 2 and 3 agreed. Thanks.
On 4, is there any other way to get the files renamed baud the metadata into tier same template as the rest and grouped within artist-album etc. I have a lot of files where I have painstakingly added metadata from databases that I have purchased these from. Unfortunately they don’t seem to exist on musicbrainz. Wouldnt this be a helpful feature to consider under rename basis metadata? Grateful for any thoughts.
Best
NH