These options define how SongKong identifies songs and albums
Force Acoustid Fingerprints even if already matched
By default Fix Songs only create Acoustids when it has to because they are quite cpu intensive but we can force it to creates acoustids for all songs by enabling the Force Acoustid Fingerprints even if already matched option. This is a good idea if later on we expect to use Delete Duplicates task with one of the Sounds the same options because these require AcoustIds. Delete Duplicates can create these if missing but they are not saved to the file so it is better to ensure they are created when run Fix Songs .
Search for a MusicBrainz match
SongKong’s main source for song matching is MusicBrainz so during normal operation you would never want to disable this option. However there are some special situations where by you may wish to disable it such as you would like to only match your songs only against Discogs and not MusicBrainz
Update from Discogs
When a match is made to a MusicBrainz album the MusicBrainz album may itself contain a link to the equivalent release on Discogs. If this option is enabled we make use of the additional information the Discogs album may have that the MusicBrainz album does not and add it to your songs metadata.
Search for a Discogs match
SongKong can also try and match songs to a Discogs album even if no match to a MusicBrainz album was found if this option is enabled.
Ignore metadata derived from filename when matching individual songs
When matching individual songs instead of complete releases SongKong uses both metadata derived from the filename and the acoustid to try and identify songs. Sometimes a single acoustid can match multiple songs so this additional metadata helps SongKong pick the correct song. If the song has no song title SongKong tries to derive the song title from the filename but if we know the filename does not represent the song title it can be ignored by enabling this option.
All existing folders represent a single album
SongKong usually groups songs by folder and assumes that one folder represents one album or single, although it does clever things to identify multi-disc releases that may store songs in one folder per disc. Then if the Only allow match if all songs in grouping match to one album is enabled SongKong will not allow a match unless all songs in the folder have been matched to one album. But many of us may have some folders just containing a collection of essentially random songs and if SongKong identifies such a folder and was not able to match all the songs to one album it will then allow individual song matching for songs in such a folder. Some of you may store all your songs in a single folder, or one folder per artist and SongKong can also detect all these situations.
But if you know that every folder already represents an album you can enable this option to prevent SongKong from detecting non-album folders. Doing so ensures that SongKong cannot possibly break up songs in any folders because all songs in folder need to match to the same release.
Preferred media formats
SongKong often finds multiple potential releases that could match a group of songs, if the release is one of your selected media formats then that potential release has their score boosted making it more likely that it is the release that SongKong selects.
Preferred Release Date
SongKong can take the release date of the potential releases into consideration, and boost the score of the earliest or more recent release, or ignore release dates entirely
Preferred Release Countries
SongKong often finds multiple potential releases that could match a group of songs, if the release was released in one of your preferred countries then that potential release has their score boosted making it more likely that it is the release that SongKong selects.