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.

[RupT]

Hi Paul,

Thanks! I’ve tried that now which does keep the LPs intact but unfortunately there are badly tagged albums in the collection too (some of which the ‘Album’ field is wrong so I can’t just run with the Album field exluded from Fix to keep it intact for the LPs) which of course that prevents from being fixed.

I think my easiest option is to manually remove the folders of the ripped vinyl, as those are the ones which are correctly tagged and also which Fix Songs would change; as they are identical to the normal album versions acoustically and there is no real difference SongKong can detect as far as I can tell between them and ordinary album versions with ‘LP’ ‘EP’ or ‘Vinyl’ in the folder and album name which it wouldn’t be able to disticguish from an incorrect tag as far as I can tell.

Then I can run Fix Songs and allow it to fix the tags on the actually incorrect tags in the rest of the collection, then recombine the LP folders before doing a deduplicate.

I think Fix Songs should manage not to have problems with special editions as they’ll likely be in one of the online databases as they’re officially separate different releases, but it can’t do that with my rips as they won’t correspond with any database entries online as I created them myself, so it defaults to the closest match which is the normal release. (If I’m understanding the process correctly)

I’m going to try that next. If you can think of a less manual process that would be great but I can’t think of any way for SongKong to distinguish between the correctly tagged vinyl rips and incorrectly tagged albums.

Thanks again!

Rupert

[paultaylor]

I mean it is an interative process, if it was me i would go with my original idea, check the results and if nothing is actually getting wrong information added I would then Apply Preview because even for your correctly tagged albums SongKong is going to improve the metadata. And importantly if these are going to be involved in the Delete Duplicates process then they need MusicBrainz Ids for the most accurate deduplication later on and I assume they don’t have them currently.

Then I would use Rename Files and set up a Move Folder on the Move tab so that you can then move the matched to releases files so left with the unmatched to release files. You could then remove the fields from the Only modify these fields if empty option, and rerun Fix Songs

Then I would look at the inconsistencies section of the report that should highlight some easy manual tagging that may be required to fully identify your releases.

There will be more work to do if you have folders that don’t actually represent an album, only playlists, are the albums with incorrect values for albums getting matched to the right album or not, support files would be helpful.

[RupT]

Hi Paul,

Thanks that’s really helpful! Sorry I wasn’t clear, I have, as you suggested originally, done the ‘Add new metatata’ process, as you said, to improve the metadata where possible.

That’s a great suggestion about using rename files with move - it sounds like that should catch all instances that way rather than me searching manually and hoping I’ve not missed anything.

I will go ahead with the process you’ve outlined there.

I’m not on the same computer at the moment so can’t get support files but will send them if needed if your suggested process throw up any problems, but logically I think that should do the trick nicely, thanks!