SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Pre-Purchase Questions

#1

Hi All –

Apologies for a forum post re these queries, but seems no way to make contact with Paul privately pre purchase…

So just a couple initial queries:

1– Just to confirm, if I purchase the Melco license, I can indeed use this on the Mac and potentially Synology NAS versions – I just simply download those versions and add the Melco license that I receive?
It’s the Naim metadata handling I am interested in as I have legacy UnitiServe rips I’d like to work on as well as current Core ripping…I will still be using the Core for the foreseeable future, but am interested in unifying everything as well as having all the WAV files ID3 tagged for future use….

2– ‘Replace Text/Characters’: I’ve briefly read through the guides, but not sure if this is covered or too specific a use re file/tag renaming…Is it possible to batch replace specific text or characters in say track names on existing files…? i.e This may seem a bit OCD (!), but I’ve noticed across various albums that have been ripped on the Core there is often inconsistency in the ‘style’ of Apostrophe used in Track Names, often depending if I’ve selected Rovi or Musicbrainz as the Metadata source – some are ‘Straight’ style Apostrophes and some are ‘slanted’…Drives me nuts! Would it be possible to create some sort of rule that identifies all tags that include one kind and replace with the other kind…?!

3– Following on from above re-formatting and renaming: I understand SongKong generates a report after processing and saving files, but is it possible to see what is going to happen to track names and various other tags before I OK and press Save…and more to the point, intervene manually in specific areas, as I see fit…?
I’ve often used Metadatics to Tag and clean up existing albums and often have the windows open displaying all the tracks and various Tags etc and simply click into individual sections as I see fit or want to override what is being populated…
I’m presuming this can all be done with the Manual Edit mode as it is in the spreadsheet layout and I presume each cell can be clicked into (?), but is there a way to do this when Batch processing a folder of albums i.e clicking through album by album…?
I do tend to gravitate to processing albums one at a time, just out of fear of things going awry…I understand there’s a Per Album feature being worked on, but what is the situation currently…?

4– Rules: I understand Rules or ‘Masks’ can be created and applied to files as one desires…Does this include Format Styles for text…? i.e I’ve noticed some databases use Sentence Case for track names and others will use Title Case…They also will use a mixture of both across different albums and artists….and then of course you get cases where the artist obviously wanted it a certain way i.e all Lower Case (which I would respect)……As SongKong’s mission statement is Consistency, is there a way to handle this and set up a rule that applies one chosen style across all (unless I manually intervene of course!)…?

OK, thanks in advance. Apologies for the lengthy queries, but just wanted to make sure some of my basic ideals are possible….

Looks like great piece of in-depth software though…

SC

#2

No need to apologise the whole purpose of the forum is that customers can ask questions and I try to answer them, if the questions and answers are useful to others that is great and saves me having to answer the same questions again. If another forum does not find the question useful they have no need to read the topic.

Correct

We don’t currently have a Replace text/Characters option, as our basis premise is that SongKong is for automated tagging and our primary source is MusicBrainz that usually does a very good job with Formatting. However the apostrophe variations drove me mad as well. So when matching from MusicBrainz we are actually using our copy of MusicBrainz and in this we remove slanted apostrophes with straight apostrophes because these are much easier to work with.

SongKong was primarily designed for automated matching of whole music collections. In this situation it would not be good for user to check each album one at a time, so currently there is no way to check before save. However you can Undo Fixes after save because we store all modifications in our database as well, and you can also run the task in Preview Only first to see what changes would be made without making them.

However, I have realized that some customers like to work one album at a time and in this case it would be possible to allow checking before save. I am actually working on this right now so it will be in the next release.

No, because again our primary database is MusicBrainz and this already has very detailed rules about entering data, that is far better then we could achieve with simple formatting rules. Ideally, for ultimate consistency if 100% of your songs are matched to MusicBrainz albums that would give the best consistency but this is unlikely currently but most users get at least 85%

#3

Many thanks Paul, much appreciated….
I understand your points, mostly, and will purchase the license shortly….

Couple of follow on queries, if I may:

Yeah, I’m begging to understand SongKong is more ‘automated’ based…I kinda feel I want something in between – though I guess this is addressed in your point further down….
Funny the Apostrophe thing got to you also :rofl: – I just thought I was being picky and OCD…! Interestingly, it was mostly the Musicbrainz lookups via the Naim Core that has given the slanted Apostrophes, Rovi’s are all the straight style – how is it ‘your’ Musicbrainz database is the straight style…?..…I don’t mind either style in a way, but just want consistency…I’m not even sure which is technically more ‘correct’, but regardless, happy that your lookups would indeed unify them all….[Edit: Would this be the same via Jaikoz, I guess it uses the very same database version…?]

Understood…Preview Mode sounds something of a solution I guess…
Like the sounds of the Per Album Mode you are working on…. :+1:

OK. I confess I’m no expert re the various available music databases, but it does strike me just how much variation there is between a few of them…Can any be considered definitive…? And from an Artist or Label perspective? I always thought Gracenote was ‘the’ one, and indeed what iTunes/Apple Music refers to and for years that was sort of my reference point…I know there’s been issues over the years and that it’s license based, but it seems strange that it is not built into more Tagging software…?

– After I posted yesterday, I then read up re the Jaikoz software…In some ways, it seems more suitable for me and does indeed include some of the features I was querying above – i.e Replacing Text etc – though I also sense it is a little ‘dated’, if that is fair….In many ways a combo of the two software platforms would be ideal, rolled into the one solution….I saw the website states many customers have both – I guess there’s no Bundle option…?
Of course, Jaikoz does not have the ‘Melco’ feature re reading the Naim generated Metadata……

– Re Naim Wav Metadata reading: When this is used in SongKong, does it use the Naim text file (inc user edits) and then present the files tagged as is, to be saved & ID3 embedded….OR, does it use this info as a ‘basis’ to then go and do the usual SongKong automated Musicbrainz lookup…thus, in a way, it’s discarding any user edits that I may desire to keep….?

Thanks in advance and sorry for the extended queries……

SC

P.S. I had to remove some of your quoted links, as I’m a newbie here it would only allow me to re quote 2 of them…! :roll_eyes:

#4

So SongKong queries our own Albunack database, this is regularly rebuilt from MusicBrainz and Discogs databases, and then an optimized search index is designed specifically for SongKong and Jaikoz. This gives us massive performance improvement, plus stability and control, plus we can tidy up some elements of the data.

One such tidy up is converting all apostrophes to straight apostrophes. We do this because this is what 99% of users use when they enter an apostrophe on the computer and what all the other music databases uses. Whilst MusicBrainz may be (possibly I’m not sure) technically correct it is an outlier here with the desire to move to slanted apostrophes.

SongKong is more automated but we do intend to beef up the manual editing of SongKong and already have a Replace Chars issue.

I promise you alot more care and attention is put into edits in the MusicBrainz database then any other, with many ecoteric cases considered. Where as with Gracenote they mainly recieve feeds from record labels and just dump it in without much consideration.

My understanding is it is expensive, and prohibitive licensing terms prevent you using another database such as Musicbrainz in same software. Also in my cases I would not be able to put data into my own optimized database albunack would have to use Gracenote api.

yes, it is currently better for manual editing and some adhoc stuff. But most of new development goes into SongKong, this would be my first choice.

The user interface and some key ways about how they work is very different so not possible to combine, but SongKong can already do most things that Jaikoz can. If you purchase SongKong I can offer you a promo code on Jaikoz.

It does the first using the Naim Import Metadata task so you get al your user edits
You can at a later date run Fix songs to improve metadata further with MusicBrainz, and yo can protect fields with metadata from being overwritten using the Only Modify Fields if Empty option

#5

Understood….and sounds good re the Replace Characters function if that is to be added soon…

Yes, I’m starting to see that. Not always ‘perfect’, but I mostly prefer their tagging….and I like how it often defers to how I presume an artist would specifically want things…eg, check out Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times, with the O using the correct Peace character…. :+1:

Interesting to know.

OK, understood. I guess it makes sense to try the combo of the two over the weeks ahead and see how I go…I suspect there’s going to be aspects of each that I use…Perhaps over time, and as either platform develops further, I may hone in on one most of the time…I do like the Jaikoz feature re adjusting text casing etc – for example I tend to prefer track names to be in proper Title Case whereas for the overall album title I prefer that to be capitalised on each word, even if it includes words such as A/The/In etc etc……
As long as they both use the very same database and result in the same formatting and styles, which it sounds like they will exactly do, then I don’t mind flicking between the two for whatever I want to be doing….

Many thanks for the bundle offer, that’s great. As discussed offline, I have now followed up and purchased Jaikoz also. :+1:

Sounds perfect. Just as I would want it to work I think….I guess I’ll find my way once I try a few examples….
Further query on this – If I am correct, does the Naim Metadata file retain the CD ID that is found when the initial rip takes place, even after there is then a subsequent Rovi/Musicbrainz lookup and/or user edits – I think this may be in the ‘Legacy’ section of the Tags in the App…? I’m just wondering if this would be used upon the potential further ‘Fix Songs’ SongKong pass and especially in the few examples of CDs that I have ripped that the Naim has returned no results at all……?

Couple more things:

– When you utilise the Undo feature in Songkong, is that a full ‘automated’ Undo or can you partially undo specific sections as desired? Or would this be where a manual edit comes in….?

– This may be a naive question, but when using Songkong/Jaikoz over files that have been purchased online, i.e 24Bit WAVs, how does it go about matching those to a particular album version…? Obviously with CD based files there is the CD ID, but with digital files from various original sources, how is this handled…? I’m guessing just from the existing Tags and perhaps some AcosticID …?

Thanks again Paul. I look forward to giving all a spin in the near future (just got my head in a big ripping session at present!)…I like the ethos of the software you have and the obvious ‘care’ and passion towards the subject……One thing is for sure, cannot fault your attention and support, exemplary…. :smiley:

SC

#6

Okay actually there is no such thing as a CD ID. But when you rip the original CD software can accurately calculate the length of each track and create a checksum based on the length and order of the tracks. Then cd ripping software such as Naim or dbPoweramp can look up that checksum in a database and retrieve information about the disc. These databases are not created by the record companies they are created by 3rd parties such as Rovi. Sometimes two Cds will have the exact same number of tracks with exact same length for each track which is why sometimes you get multiple options consisting of completely different albums. The checksum method is only suitable for albums (at least 10 tracks), releases such as CD singles do not have enough tracks to have much chance of getting unique checksum.

Now, when I say they calculate the length of each track its not actually based on track length in time but on CD frames, this can only be calculated from the disc itself, it cannot be calculated from the encoded audio files on your computer

So music taggers do not use this method, and correctly identifying album is harder without the CD. SongKong uses four main methods:

  • Albunack Ids, this is similar discid but based on the track length of the encoded files
  • AcoustIds, fingerprinting songs, good for identifying songs but not the album
  • Existing metadata, helps grouping songs into likely albums and verifying potential Acoustid matches
  • Existing folder structure and filename, again helps grouping songs into likely albums and verifying potential Acoustid matches

It depends what you mean. So if you run Fix Songs over your whole music collection, you can select a subfolder and just undo changes to files in that folder, you do not have to undo changes to all files. But you cannot elect to only undo changes to some fields within a file, you have to undo all changes. The reasoning is to easily allow you to undo changes in rare cases that SongKong has matched to wrong album. In the case that SongKong has matched to right album but you don’t like how the metadata has been modified for some fields this can be best remedied by again using Undo Changes, modify your options and rerun Fix Songs.

As explained above there is no CD ID, we use other methods for all songs.