Fix Songs Avoid Changing Different Releases

[RupT]

Hi All,

New to Song Kong so this could be me being an idiot and missing an existing function but I can’t seem to figure it out.

The problem is:

• Largeish music collection (approx 70000 tracks)
• Lots of duplicates with slightly different metadata (e.g. same .mp3 or .flac but at some point one of my friends/family has retagged a lot of the collection and it’s been put back in the folder so identical track with different metadata with things like long titles cut short): Fix Songs would be ideal for this.
• However, I have also got a bunch of acousically very similar (the acoustic fingerprinting doesn’t tell the difference) tracks from special editions and ripped vinyl copies that are currently correctly (to me) tagged and the album names are appended with ‘Vinyl’, ‘EP’, ‘LP’ or something else (in the case of special editions). I need Fix Songs not to change these.

It’s not really practical for me to manually find and take out these tracks throughout the whole library as I’ve ripped quite a few vinyl versions over the years so is there any way of excluding them from renaming?

The only way I can think of to exlude the vinyl from being retagged is to filter to exclude folders with ‘vinyl’ and ‘LP’ in the name but that could still miss some ep’s and special editions, and I have no idea how to implement a filter like that.

Any ideas would be most gratefully recieved, thanks!

All the best!

Rupert

[paultaylor]

SongKong does not only use Acoustids it also groups songs into logical groups and use the existing metadata and folder/filenames to ensure it finds the right album version. However there may be cases where there are multiple different versions that meet the critera and even if matched correctly you don’t want certain fields modified such as Album

My first thought is to use the Add new metadata only profile so none of your existing metadata is modified. This is done by adding all fields to Only modify these fields if empty - so if you are happy for some fields to be overwritten they could be removed from list.

Run Fix Songs with Preview only enabled and carefully review the generated report and then only use Apply Preview task to make the changes for real if you are happy with the results. If you run Create Support Files after running Fix Songs I can review it with you/answer any questions you have about the results.

@RupT

The only way I can think of to exlude the vinyl from being retagged is to filter to exclude folders with ‘vinyl’ and ‘LP’ in the name but that could still miss some ep’s and special editions, and I have no idea how to implement a filter like that.

Preferences:Files & Folders has an excluded list of folders that SongKong should ignore, But it is a list of real folders it doesn’t accept wildcards so would not really work for you, but I think the better approach anyway is my first suggestion.