Noob help: Can i achieve my goals with SongKong and if so how?

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

i don’t understand how to use iscompilation=“1” to create a scripter, im struggling to understand how to construct the scripters and filename masks and what logic legally combines different script components.

Scripter is for setting metadata fields to combinations of other metadata fields
File Rename is for renaming files based on combination of other metadata fields
But both use the script variables to referecne metadata fields

You can create scripts in Preferences and then use them in Scripter task but since it is such a simple script simplest to do the following

• Select Compilations Folder
• Select Scripter task
• Select Start to select Default profile

• In Overall Script field enter iscompilation=“1”

• Select Start to run task

Done

[steveyg777]

i’ve uploaded again. ill look at the videos

[paultaylor]

It has made steady progress,

Another 60 song only matches have been identified from MusicBrainz, (see MusicBrainz bar below)

Old Version

New Version

There are no longer any folders with only some songs matched to Musicbrainz, this Incomplete Folders tab from old report is missing from new report

And the number of split folders has reduced from eight to four

Old version

New version

But you are still running in Preview mode, I would run this for real now, also worth noting it is worth running twice because sometimes Song Only matches from the first run help it to find album matches second time round.

Then you are left with three folders that contains matched to multiple different MusicBrainz albums (using the MusicBrainz:With Split Album Match filter)

So in this case looks like should all be same album so you should force match using Match to One Album

Whereas in this case maybe they are different albums and would be resolved when renamed into different album folders

My point is that its not a great idea to start renaming files until have reviewed and happy with the metadata

[steveyg777]

ok, this is helpful bit of ‘walkthrough’ and is beginning to make a bit more sense with how to work with the app and what it is doing, options to then process better, etc but im certainly not anywhere near where i need to be in my understanding. i will be looking at the videos in a sec but they look like brief overviews instead of detailed walkthroughs? either way im sure they will help at least a little.

i did try to scan one album - a tribe called quest - People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (of which i have 2 simliarly named album folders. im assuming i can only choose one folder at a time to process(?) unless i move all songs into the one folder? anyway i processed the one folder with match to one album and it came up with a list of possible albums. however i can’t figure out how to konw which album corresponds to which version on MB because the strange numbers included with each of sk’s entries i can’t seem to find those numbers on MB versions, for example “People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm (1588539) by A Tribe Called Quest with catalogue no J2-1331 on label Jive released in year 1990 in country United States with score of 76” - which does it relate to on the MB page at https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/02adb8a7-496c-3a9a-a324-662df73fdba5 ???
at this point i would at least find it super helpful for the sk’s release list to include the amount of tracks included (im sure picard does this and makes it far easier to find what im looking for without even needing to go to MB pages because i figure that if i just look for the release with the highest amount of tracks then it gives my songs the most likely chance to be matched to one album release - is that good logic?

so how do i find the specific releae in sk’s list after deciding on the release found on MB’s page of releases?

[steveyg777]

so i’ve just consolidated the 2 simlilarly named folders mentioned before (thinking thats how im supposed to do ‘match to one album’ with sk because it doesn’t seem to allow me to choose more than one folder-?) and it is now saying “We were unable to find any matches that matched all your songs to one album” what should i do?

ps- it’s also saying it for the Midnight Marauders folder you told me to perform this mode on

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

i will be looking at the videos in a sec but they look like brief overviews instead of detailed walkthroughs?

It takes a fair old time to create a video and everybody wants something slightly different, we want to create more but really the tutorial is where we have more detail covering most things.

@steveyg777

of which i have 2 simliarly named album folders. im assuming i can only choose one folder at a time to process(?) unless i move all songs into the one folder?

yes, well the normal situation is they are usually already in one folder, although I can see selecting multiple folders would be a nice to have feature. But you can process each folder in turn and specify the same release.

@steveyg777

however i can’t figure out how to konw which album corresponds to which version on MB because the strange numbers included with each of sk’s entries i can’t seem to find those numbers on MB versions, for example “People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm (1588539) by A Tribe Called Quest with catalogue no J2-1331 on label Jive released in year 1990 in country United States with score of 76”

Okay SongKong brings back both MusicBrainz and Discogs potential matches, when it is just a number rather than a hexadecimal guid it is a Discogs match

Selecting View Allbum takes you straight to the page on MusicBrainz or Discogs

e.g

https://www.discogs.com/release/1588539-A-Tribe-Called-Quest-Peoples-Instinctive-Travels-And-The-Paths-Of-Rhythm?redirected=true

@steveyg777

at this point i would at least find it super helpful for the sk’s release list to include the amount of tracks

That is a very good point, dont know why I didnt do this and have raised an issue for this.

@steveyg777

because i figure that if i just look for the release with the highest amount of tracks then it gives my songs the most likely chance to be matched to one album release - is that good logic?

Not really, i would take the first one, this one has the highest score or go with the one with same number of tracks possibly.

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

so i’ve just consolidated the 2 simlilarly named folders mentioned before (thinking thats how im supposed to do ‘match to one album’ with sk because it doesn’t seem to allow me to choose more than one folder-?) and it is now saying “We were unable to find any matches that matched all your songs to one album” what should i do?

ps- it’s also saying it for the Midnight Marauders folder you told me to perform this mode on

Okay I think the issue is that you have duplicate files, especially tracks 8 and 10.

So just try manually deleting them and retrying. You could also use Delete Duplicates but in this case I think just easier to manually delete them since it is obvious what the duplicates are.

[steveyg777]

do you mean that ‘match to one album’ can’t cope with duplicates during the process? surely it could just be told to tag them the same, it’s not like i am renaming them yet so i don’t see why this should be a problem

[paultaylor]

No, bcause the whole point is you are trying to match a group of songs to one album, and if you have duplicate songs then you are in effect matching to multiple albums (or at least the same album multiple times).

Fix Songs copes with duplicates but Match to One Album is designed to match everything to one album.

The thing is once you start allowing this kind of match you are opening the doors to allowing bad matches. Because the algorithm looks at the songs and try to match each song to a track on the album, and only allows match if all songs could be matched to a track on the album and every track is assigned to a different song.

Sometimes if the metadata quality is bad there can be a song that could potentially match to multiple songs (e.g similar track length and no acoustid or metadata to tell it otherwise), but the restriction of only matching one song to one track helps work out the right mapping. If you remove this restriction then cannot reliably work out a valid mapping.

[steveyg777]

ok that makes sense. so can you give me steps to ‘fix songs’ for a folder (that i want to ‘match to one album’ later) so that i can fix the meta data as best as possible at that point and then i can use the ‘duplicates’ function on that folder alone, THEN run it through ‘match to one album’ please? (namely, which settings need to be toggled on/off?)

[paultaylor]

Have you run Fix Songs on test folder with Preview disabled yet, if not just rerun with Preview disabled. Then cant you manually delete these duplicate files I dont really want to have to explain Delete Duplicates now because it seems like an unneccessarily distraction from the core task. Then simply run Match to One Album on those two folders to see if that resolves the issue.

[steveyg777]

yes i already did without preview. ok i did those steps and it put 2 songs into a single now, so i don’t mind this as i usually try to collect full discographies for artists i like.
just one thing i would find useful - if i could toggle on/off being able to automtically opening the report or not. i haven’t always got my browser open and when i do i usually already have tons of tabs open over several windows. some times i think i’d rather be able to open the folder where all the reports are saved and do quickview on my mac for speed if i am just reviewing simply (which i could also see from the small summary window in sk anyway.
where are reports saved to?

[steveyg777]

i am trying to go through the issues still apparent with this test set. i am looking at:

• [/Volumes/T7/Temp/!SongKong/Test/!audio-test CONTROL copy/The Almighty/The Very Best]The folder has 6 songs but only 4 have a value for the Album field.

i tried to select only this folder and do match to one album but it didn’t work, saying it couldn’t fetch the MB reference for that id or something like that. i tried fix songs for that folder only and it didn’t update or save anything. what should i be doing to fix them?

support files updated by the way

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

just one thing i would find useful - if i could toggle on/off being able to automtically opening the report or not

Yes, on Save tab just set After SongKong has finished processing songs to Never open Report in browser

They are accessible from the List of all Reports under the Reports menu

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

[/Volumes/T7/Temp/!SongKong/Test/!audio-test CONTROL copy/The Almighty/The Very Best]The folder has 6 songs but only 4 have a value for the Album field.

Okay that message is wrong, it should actually say The folder has 6 songs with 4 different values for Album field, that is already fixed for next release.

If you look at the folder you can clearly see that there are multiple values for the Album field

Fix Songs probably not going set all as one album because of conflicting information, Match to One Album should work, if indeed all these songs are available on one Album ?

But if you tried that must have been after sent me support files because last thing I have is Fix SongsReport00024

[steveyg777]

yes i can’t find that album on MB. so how do i let song kong match the songs to their correct albums? i tried turning off the “only match when all songs in a release group match to one album” but it still complains that songs have different albums.

one question. under album format tab it says " Multi Disc Releases: Always add Disc Title or Disc No to the Disc Subtitle"
personally id only like to add a disc number if it is multi disc and only add subtitles if they exist. i can’t see an option for this, can it be done?

also, is there somewhere i can edit ‘profiles’?

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

yes i can’t find that album on MB. so how do i let song kong match the songs to their correct albums?

So you are saying that there is in fact no album that has all these songs, so is it the case that the songs are already matched to the correct album?

If so the Inconsistencies report is just showing potential inconsistencies and in this case the inconsistenty is reall that you have songs from differrent albums in the same folder, and wil be resolved by renaming the files so that they are in their own folder.

@steveyg777

one question. under album format tab it says " Multi Disc Releases: Always add Disc Title or Disc No to the Disc Subtitle"
personally id only like to add a disc number if it is multi disc and only add subtitles if they exist. i can’t see an option for this, can it be done?

All these options relate to the subtitle field so the option you want to set it to is to Add Disc Subtitle if Disc has Title

If you mean you only want to add a value to the Disc No field if multi disc there is no option for this because it is wrong, if single disc then Disc No should be set to 1, not blank. If have set to blank then you cant tell if that means it is 1 or that you just dont know the Disc No

If you really wanted to do this then you could write a script that deletes the discno field when not multi disc but I would not recommend it.

[steveyg777]

thanks Paul. No i couldn’t find an album called “very best of” or simliar by this artist so it was problably an album/compilation that someone created themselves. so therefore i have songs that belong to several other valid albums - how can i process them then? because the songs are in the one folder does this mean sk won’t touch their tags? obviously i may still need to tag the songs (regardless of being part of several other albums) so how do i get sk to fix their tags still?

sorry, it is partly that I’m getting confused - thinking that the tagging and renaming will both be carried out in the same process lol.
so, therefore, even though sk complains about the songs being from several albums i can ignore this and then when i rename them they will be moved into their correct albums right?

again, im getting confused about the renaming process - I want disc number and subtitles to be included in the renaming process. so i think i’ll use the last option for these tags when tagging with the ‘fix songs’ function.

i hope all this makes sense?

i think when you can explain these queries i will be ready to begin to look at the renaming function so i’ll need to create the filename masks. would you be able to help me regarding my original formatting requirements please Paul?

[paultaylor]

@steveyg777

because the songs are in the one folder does this mean sk won’t touch their tags?

No, there are two situations:

1. Songs in a folder with no existing metadata, SongKong will try to match all songs to one album, if that is not possible but it can identify some of the songs then it will update them Song Only, this means update song fields that shouldnt change whatever release they are on such as title and artist but not update album specific fields such as album, track no and album artist

2. Songs already matched to MusicBrainz, then Songkong groups based on this metadata i.e subgroups with folder

If For Songs already matched option set to Update Metadata Only then it will update based on the existing Musicbrainz Id

If For Songs already matched option set to Rematch then it will try to rematch the subgroup, they may be rematched to the same id of a different one whatever seems to be best match.

So for this folder falls into the last case, they are already matched and probably to the best match

@steveyg777

sorry, it is partly that I’m getting confused - thinking that the tagging and renaming will both be carried out in the same process lol.

So for Fix Songs no renaming is done. For Match To One Album because it is only working on one album at a time, we allow it fix songs and rename, but I noticed there is a bug introduced in this release that by default Rename is enabled when it should be disabled so you may/may not want to modify that option.

@steveyg777

so, therefore, even though sk complains about the songs being from several albums i can ignore this and then when i rename them they will be moved into their correct albums right?

Correct, at least in this case.

@steveyg777

again, im getting confused about the renaming process - I want disc number and subtitles to be included in the renaming process. so i think i’ll use the last option for these tags when tagging with the ‘fix songs’ function.

So that option only affect what is put in the Disc Subtitle field for multi disc releases the options are

• Never add Subtitle
• Add Subtitle if there is one
• Add Subititle if there is one, if not add Disc No

Looking at your original rename mask requirements I would think you want the second option, i.e just add subtitle

@steveyg777

i think when you can explain these queries i will be ready to begin to look at the renaming function so i’ll need to create the filename masks. would you be able to help me regarding my original formatting requirements please Paul?

Yes, but I will look at it later today because I am keen to try and release ovedue next version of SongKong first!

[steveyg777]

No problem. I’ve noticed some typos that you might want to check for.