Despite a lot of help with duplicates and upgrading album art, SongKong has caused me quite a bit of extensive additional work. I wish I had tried on a larger sample set initially.
My biggest issue is that right now SongKong appears to have torn songs out of albums that they really were in and placed them in folders for albums that I did not actually have.
Now I think I am partly at fault for this because I turned off both “Only allow match if all songs in folder match to one album” and “Only allow match if all songs in album were matched”.
My reasoning for turning these off had been that I have a mix of downloads (in decreasing order) from Amazon MP3, iTunes, Google Play store, Rhapsody, and directly from artist web sites. Additionally I have quite the mishmash of full albums, singles, and individual songs from albums where I may have one to three (or so) songs from am album but not the whole album.
I was concerned that the default settings were a bit restrictive and not match my odd collection. Now I’m trying to figure out how to return songs back to the albums they were downloaded in initially.
Well, Yes Im afraid that is exactly the reason. If you turn these off then SongKong should only match the right songs but may match them to the wrong album if the correct album is not in the database.
If you had just unchecked Only allow match if all songs in album were matched that would have allowed you to match incomplete albums without breaking up groupings.
If you had just fixed metadata but not elected to Rename files based on metadata when matched then it would have been easier to recover.
Of course SongKong cannot really determine between a mismatch of songs that were not from an album, and a group of songs that are from an album but the album is not in the database, Although it does a couple of things to try and do this, if you keep both options on and Songkong comes across a folder of 100 of songs with completely different metadata it treats them as random songs that can be matched individually.
So what you could have done is kept those options on and run Fix Songs and possibly set a folder to move matched songs to in the File Moving tab.
Then off the remaining songs decide which ones are already organized and part of bona fide albums, and which are random tracks. Then move the random tracks to a different location, turn those options off and run against just those songs.
If you haven’t emptied the database by updating SongKong to a new version or manually empty the database then you can just use Revert Songs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Tm2z1BO9TQ .
However seeing as we have just done a new release I suspect you have, maybe you have a backup you can use ?
Failing that the quality of the database has improved now moved to the Jthink Music Server so you may get better matches now but you need to manually move songs back into the folder groupings they were originally in if you want to force SongKong to match songs to that folder.
Alternatively you could use Jaikoz (the free version lets you save twenty files in one session) to select files you know to belong to one album and then use one of the Action:Remote Match:Match to Release functions
Thanks for the info Paul. You are correct that my database was cleared due to the recent update. I did not make a backup of it.
When I purchased SongKong I also purchased as Jaikoz license so I will start playing around with it to see how to match to albums other than the one that the song is currently matched to.
So I checked “Only allow match if all songs in folder match to one album” but left “Only allow match if all songs in album were matched” unchecked.
Unfortunately SongKong still breaks albums.
Example, with The Beatles boxed set, with those settings my folders before SongKong running are:
[list]A Hard Days Night[/list]
[list]Abbey Road[/list]
[list]Beatles For Sale[/list]
[list]Help[/list]
[list]Let It Be[/list]
[list]Magical Mystery Tour[/list]
[list]Past Masters CD 1[/list]
[list]Past Masters CD 2[/list]
[list]Please Please Me[/list]
[list]Revolver[/list]
[list]Rubber Soul[/list]
[list]Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band[/list]
[list]The Beatles CD 1[/list]
[list]The Beatles CD 2[/list]
[list]With The Beatles[/list]
[list]Yellow Submarine[/list]
After running SongKong my folders for The Beatles are:
[list]Abbey Road[/list]
[list]Beatles For Sale[/list]
[list]Help![/list]
[list]Let It Be[/list]
[list]Magical Mystery Tour[/list]
[list]Meet The Beatles (disc 1 Meet the Beatles)[/list]
[list]Meet The Beatles (disc 2 The Beatles Second Album)[/list]
[list]Meet The Beatles (disc 3 A Hard Day’s Night)[/list]
[list]Past Masters, Volume One[/list]
[list]Past Masters, Volume Two[/list]
[list]Please Please Me[/list]
[list]Revolver[/list]
[list]Rubber Soul[/list]
[list]Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band[/list]
[list]The Beatles[/list]
[list]The U.S. Albums (disc 13 Hey Jude)[/list]
[list]The U.S. Albums (disc 6 Beatles’ 65)[/list]
[list]With The Beatles[/list]
[list]Yellow Submarine[/list]
Note that several of these new folders only have a few songs in them.
Okay, boxsets are a special case because they are a box of multiple albums. Generally each album will be in its own folder and because each album will probably exist in Musicbrainz in its own right that folder/album can be completety matched to an album , without matching to the box set.
In general given if SongKong is given a number of folders each containing an album, AND those folders all comprise a boxset/series as well it is quite difficult to know what the customer wants it to be matched to