SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Re-assembling fractured Albums/Releases (iTunes/Music, Roon, SongKong)

#1

I very much appreciate the Roon settings that used to appear in SongKong (the “box set” option is still there after yesterday’s upgrade). I began my digital collection by ripping CDs losslessly into iTunes (in ALAC) more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I now have many mis-matched tracks and partial “album” folders on my hard drive. In the past I have run Music’s “Consolidate” function, but that sometimes results in mismatches and, in the worst cases, splitting up compilations and associating “songs” with their original albums.

I have a lot of track name duplication between original releases, remasters/re-releases, different sample rates, and various compilations. What are the best SongKong settings to properly re-assemble albums that have become fractured over the years? I understand that terminology varies from app to app, which is why I get confused over SongKong’s use of “Album” and “Release,” which sometimes means “folder” in Mac Finder file structure, but not necessarily.

Thanks again. I’m still teaching myself how to use SongKong.

#2

Hi, firstly release and album are used a bit interchangeably. A release is a physical release by an artist such as an album or single, but sometimes we just use the word album when we could mean album, single ectera as that word is better understood than release.

It is much easier for SongKong, Roon and most other audio player/organizer software if your music is stored in folders the format albumartist/release and for multi-disc releases albumartist/release/disc 1 - albumartist/release/disc 2…, so that albums are stored in folders but Album doesnt mean Folder.

Metadata can be used when playing music to view how you wish but the actual files should be stored album = folder. I give a common example, a Classical album may contain works by multiple composers the customer is more interested in composer and works then the album as a whole, and sometimes customers physically split the album into multiple folders with each folder representing a work. But this is a bad idea because then more difficult to correctly identify the album for the purpose of tagging, and there is no need because metadata can be added to allow the music to be browsed at work level.

  1. Run Status Report over all music, now you have a nice report which details the starting state of your metadata
  2. Run Fix Songs over all your music with Roon profile
  3. Check the results if you are happy with how it looks and the metadata now reflects the albums better than existing folder structure rerun but this time set Basic:Rename files based on Metadata to Yes if matched to Release. This will move those files when the album has been matched
  4. Review again, at this point you may need to move a few files around and have a bit of a tidy up if they have been matched to wrong album because single songs can be found on many albums so not so easy to get the album right even if got song right.
  5. Rerun, each time you rerun songs already matched to MusicBrainz album will not be rematched so gets progressively quicker just concentrating on those songs not identified or only match song only.
#3

Thanks. I was trying to get a sense of which passes to run most effectively in which order. This is very helpful!

#4

Okay, there is also Delete Duplicates - but this should definitently be done last after songs have been identified.