SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Prefer Original Release to Compilation

#1

There have been a few posts about this issue so I’m just going to summarise how I see it.

In Jaikoz 380 (beta) if you set Preferred Release Date to Earliest Release Date Jaikoz will normally match Jaikoz to the song with the earliest release date, but there are two cases where it will not.

  1. Your song is a better metamatch to a compilation
  2. Your song is in fact a later version of a song, different to the original song that you want it to match to, normally identified by having significantly different track length.

Currently you can get round <1> by setting Prefer do not Match to Various/Single Artist Compilation , there is no way to solve problem <2>

Going forward I have had the following requests.

  1. For compilations continue to match to the compilation track but put into the Year field the release year of the original song.

  2. For compilations continue to match to the compilation track but put into Original Release Time field (ID3 only field in current version of Jaikoz) the release year of the original song.

  3. Match all fields to the earliest song you can find even if track lengths dont actually match.

I don’t like (3) firstly because its just wrong for Jaikoz to match to a song that it knows is incorrect, and secondly because it could cause problem for Musicbrainz, if having matched to these songs you send Musicbrainz Ids/Puids back to Musicbrainz you are in fact corrupting the Musicbrainz database.

It turns out that normally people want <3> just to get the correct release year, so the best solution is <2> because then the metadata is perfectly correct and it gives you the information you require. <1> is not quite correct either although its not going to corrupt Musicbrainz, of course if you really want to put the original release year into the release year field you can do that easily in Jaikoz using Prepend to Left.

Technically finding the song with the earliest release date would take forever on the current version of Musicbrainz but with Musicbrainz NGS it is alot more feasible because the same track (known as recording in NGS) can be on multiple albums so quite easy to iterate through the releases to find the earliest release date. So if you do want to keep your compilation metadata you can then use this method to get the original release date. However when the track is a different version it will not be the same recording so we cannot use this method, but we could to a more exhaustive metadata search to find tracks with same name but different lengths if not necessary to do it for every track. We can also make use of track A is an earlier version of track B relationships within Musicbrainz, those there are fairly rare.

In the interface there would simply be another match option called Do extra searches to find original release , it would also complete the ID3 fields Original Release (which would become a field for all formats) . That way you are getting the extra information you want without losing any information.

#2

If, as in my case this doesn’t actually matter, is it not possible to ignore the track length completely and just look up a song using the current filename? All my library is already correctly named so there is no need to ‘identify’ the track.

I guess the downside of this approach is where the database entry has Dancin’ On A Saturday Night, whereas my file is named Dancin On A Saturday Night (without the apostrophe) - in which case an exact match may not be found.

But, at the end of the day, you are correct and I agree that I (and I suppose a few others) are asking for non-standard options.

More importantly, I am slowly coming to the conclusion that what some of us want to do is simply not easily possible, due to limitations imposed by the way the online databases were constructed - not through any fault of Jaikoz.

For that reason I have written my own program to correct the faulty year tags after Jaikoz has cleaned everything else up. :slight_smile:

I for one though, do appreciate you taking the time to solve our problems and implement our requests.

TenBaz

#3

Exact matching doesn’t work well because I bet I can find many examples in Musicbrainz where your song title is different to how it has been recorded in Musicbrainz. So we have to do fuzzy matching and then work out which potential matches are not really matches. there is a need to ‘identify’ the track because we need to find the match on Musicbrainz (if it exists at all)

But as I say the matching can be done (although it would be slow to find the earliest release) but what I don’t want to do is match the track directly to a track which it patently is not and take all its metadata, but finding a match (and ignoring track length) and just extracting original year and original release would be okay.

[quote=TenBaz] More importantly, I am slowly coming to the conclusion that what some of us want to do is simply not easily possible, due to limitations imposed by the way the online databases were constructed - not through any fault of Jaikoz.
[/quote]
Now I understand the issue it can and will be done, just not done yet :), but of course it will only work well if the information is actually in the Musicbrainz database, and I think Musicbrainz is weaker on original vinyl releases than CD releases.

#4

I posted some info on this subject in another thread so I won’t waste time repeating it all here.

Maybe that’s a good enough reason to start a new communal music database which is based on individual tracks instead of albums?

Currently, any chart single released in the last 50 years appears in current databases - like MusicBrainz - many, many times - once for each album it has ever appeared on. And often, a track only appears at all if it was on an album which was (re)issued on CD.

Hence the difficulty in extracting a track’s actual release year.

I propose that in a new music database, each track only appear once - with the year that it first came out. Software like Jaikoz can still use the other databases for looking up albums.

Not if the new database was optimized for single tracks!.. :slight_smile:

Good reasons once again for starting another music database…

All I need to find out now is:

  • what format the database needs to be in to be usable online
  • what fields would be actually required in the database
  • what is needed on the server for others to access/add to the database

To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t know where to start! :slight_smile:

TenBaz

#5

But Musicbrainz has the capability to store all the information that is in your database, and you can already look at things from a track-centric perspective, with the NGS release this will improve further. The reason Musicbrainz is better for CDs that vinyl are twofold.

  1. In the last twenty years most music purchases have been on Cd rather than Vinyl.
  2. Cds can be loaded into Musicbrainz semi-automtically whereas Vinyl canot.

But the Musicbraiz database itself is not better suited for CD’s than Vinyl.

I don’t see the point in starting a new community based database when one (Musicbrainz) already exists. I think its worth pointing out that whereas your database contains less than 30,000 songs Musicbrainz contains 855,000 albums (and 10 million tracks - although as you say many of these are the same track on multiple albums)

I’m more than happy to put your dataset on my server so that users can benefit from the data, but I cant see the point in them adding new data to this database.

#6

Ah - I didn’t realise that. I thought it was only album oriented - like CDDB.

Neither can I now - knowing what you say above. :slight_smile:

I could put it on my own server if needs be, but doing that doesn’t seem necessary now.

My program has correctly year tagged around 75% of all the folders I’ve tested it on, but maybe I should hang on and see if the MusicBrainz NGS update solves my problems.

The only downside to waiting is that I’m working to a schedule and I can’t really afford to put off sorting out the library for too long - and it might be weeks or months until things change.

TenBaz

#7

Actually, how reliable is MusicBrainz - or any of the other databases for that matter?

I just went to MusicBrainz and used the search option to manually look for:

Elton John - Candle In The Wind

and it returned lots of results - 14529 of them, including track 17 on CD 1 of Kate Bush’s album This Woman’s Work.

http://musicbrainz.org/track/6ff87d22-5200-4ac6-9066-8b90f40aa210.html

Unfortunately, there are actually only 15 tracks on that CD!

Are there many errors like this or are they quite rare?

TenBaz

#8

[quote=TenBaz]Actually, how reliable is MusicBrainz - or any of the other databases for that matter?

I just went to MusicBrainz and used the search option to manually look for:

Elton John - Candle In The Wind

and it returned lots of results - 14529 of them, including track 17 on CD 1 of Kate Bush’s album This Woman’s Work.

http://musicbrainz.org/track/6ff87d22-5200-4ac6-9066-8b90f40aa210.html

Unfortunately, there are actually only 15 tracks on that CD!

Are there many errors like this or are they quite rare?

TenBaz[/quote]
I don’t know why you think there are only 15 tracks, there are clearly 17 tracks
http://musicbrainz.org/release/a77cdc26-32cf-44e7-9ca0-0df27e37deaf.html

The reason it returned this is that the default search is an OR search and you didnt quote things but you can make more complex searches, for example if you click ‘Advanced Query’ checkbox and enter

artist:“elton john” AND track:“Candle In The Wind”

then it will only return versions of the track you were expecting

#9

[quote=TenBaz]
The only downside to waiting is that I’m working to a schedule and I can’t really afford to put off sorting out the library for too long - and it might be weeks or months until things change.

TenBaz[/quote]
I think you’ll have to rely on your database for now because NGS release date is not finalised and Ive got to add the code to Jaikoz as well. But all I’m saying is if you make your data available that somebody might be able to use that to add missing data to Musicbrainz, and that will benefit you in the long run.

#10

Yes - but only if you believe what MusicBrainz tells you! :slight_smile:

http://www.amazon.com/This-Womans-Work-Anthology-1978/dp/samples/B000006XC1/ref=dp_tracks_all_1#disc_1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Woman’s_Work_(box_set)

In fact, nowhere on the net can I find This Woman’s Work (including the anthology box set) where there are 17 tracks on the first CD. Even Discogs says there are only 15 tracks (7.1 to 7.15) in the boxed set…

http://www.discogs.com/Kate-Bush-This-Womans-Work-Anthology-1978-1990/release/1040301

Fair enough.

The point is, since posting, I have found a number of other MusicBrainz searches which also returned faulty info. But I’ll try again using the advanced search and see if they still pop up.

With the MusicBrainz database so huge, I suppose it would be impossible to guarantee it was totally error-free. So, I was just wondering how wide-scale the errors were. Maybe they are very rare and I’ve just been unlucky as I’ve been searching for older vinyl releases.

TenBaz

#11

hehe, I thought you were right for a minute but if you read the wikipedia entry link you sent

You’ll see it says it says at the end of the contents section

'All songs written by Kate Bush (except “Lord of the Reedy River” by Donovan). A revised version of one of the This Woman’s Work bonus discs includes her 1991 recordings of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and “Candle in the Wind.”

Although Musicbrainz does have mistakes I think you’ll find that the quality of the data is second to none, most editors are very careful about their edits and every change is subject to voting by other editors.

In fact if you create a free Musicbrainz account you can see who applied the edits and when with this link

http://musicbrainz.org/mod/search/results.html?object_type=album&orderby=desc&object_id=106734

#12

:slight_smile:

I admit defeat gracefully.

That’s all I needed to know, so I’ll stop bugging you now.

And, as a thank-you for putting up with all my questions (made worse as it’s from a non-registered user), I’ve decided to rectify the situation and just bought a license! :slight_smile:

TenBaz

#13

This would be the greatest thing ever. I’d like an option to put that into the actual Year column; I know it’s not strictly accurate but there is no reason to have Louis Armstrong come up as 1993. I don’t give a hoot what year the physical CD was pressed; I want that song to show up in my’30s or '40s or '50s playlist, not my '90s!

#14

Glad you like the idea, maybe I will allow the date to go straight into the year field, but a bit uneasy about it because it isn’t correct. You could be able to create the playlists using the Original Release Time but this doesnt appear to be supported in iTunes.

#15

Paul,
let the user choose in preference, where he would like to save the original release year either to the original Release field or to the year field

#16

Thanks for the info

#17

I’m sorry to bump an old thread, but this thread was the best information I could find on this exact problem. Paul, I completely agree that option 2 (having Jaikoz populate a separate Original Release Year field) is by far the best option. I use Jaikoz to rename the folders in the form of “(Year) Artist - Album” and I didn’t even realize the issue until I thought it curious that Queen released 3 albums in 2011:P. I could just use Original Release Year in my renaming mask, if only I could get Jaikoz to populate this field. I’m sorry if this information is elsewhere in the forums or documentation (I swear I looked!) but my Original Release Year field is totally empty and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get Jaikoz to populate it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

#18

Are you saying Original release year field is always empty or that you cant get the value from the field into the filename ?

If the former have you checked that Preferences:MusicBrainz:Format:Put Original Year into Year field is not enabled.

#19

[quote=paultaylor]Are you saying Original release year field is always empty or that you cant get the value from the field into the filename ?

If the former have you checked that Preferences:MusicBrainz:Format:Put Original Year into Year field is not enabled.[/quote]

It is indeed the former. I had Put Original Year into Year field checked. I realize how, in this instance, it was foolish of me to have this checked, but from how I interpret the button, Autocorrecting should have replaced the year field* with the original year (*or whatever its called, I only knew of one date field before I encountered this issue, sorry I’m currently at work or I’d check for the exact term). This clearly didn’t happen because I ended up with, for example, 3 Queen albums from 2011 after “rename folder from metadata”. Once I have a Original Year field populated in the metadata I know how to use that in the javascript to change my folder naming (in fact I’ve already written it), but could you perhaps provide a bit more of an explanation on what this button actually does when checked/unchecked, since I’m still a bit confused (and I’m quite sure the misunderstanding is solely on me).

So assuming UNCHECKING this “Put Original Year into Year field” will allow me to populate the “Original Release Year” (or is it Original Release Date?) field with Autocorrect, is there a way for me to have Jaikoz populate this field, alone, without actually Autocorrecting everything else in the tag? For the most part the Autocorrect was dead on, but I made a ton of changes to a number of the records and I’d rather not have to redo the whole process.

As a total aside (and sorry that this isn’t the place to ask a different question), I’m taking my partially metatagged music collection on my Macbook for the xmas holiday and plan to purchase a Mac copy of Jaikoz do some work on my collection while at home. Will copying my settings folder in the Windows User Directory and then writing it over wherever the Mac install puts the setting folder sync the settings? I’d rather not have to rewrite all the javascript masks or trust myself to get all the same options clicked (since I already proved unable to effectively do that :slight_smile: )

Thanks in advance and seriously cannot say enough how much I love this program.

#20

Yes, you can already do that.