Recreate / Recombine Compilation Albums

[nexus2511]

Hi everyone,

At some point in time my music library has become a bit messed up. I’ve always had a lot of compilation albums, and at some point they’ve lost their mojo and reverted to artist-specific track/album matches. I don’t think this was the fault of any particular tool, unless that tool is me because I didn’t know what I was doing…

I now have SongKong and Jaikoz, and a desire to somehow fix the mess without wasting the rest of my life doing it. This is also all a precursor to subscribing to iTunes Match and / or Apple Music, so I’d like to sort it out once and for all.

So, is there some strategy that could help to alleviate the problem, and recreate or recombine my many albums that are now all mixed up? I’ve tried many settings over time, in both SongKong and Jaikoz, but based on one of Paul’s blog-posts I’ve essentially settled on SongKong as the best bet for this. Is that a wise assumption?

What I’ve tried most recently is to move all matched, complete, albums to another folder, and then to work on the “unmatched” remainder. This seems to be a good start, but what to do next, and how to rebuild the “lost” compilations? As an example, I have many Beatles albums, with many spare / hanging songs, and no idea of what albums some songs originally came from. How do I recombine them, or is this a hopeless task?

Can someone suggest a reasonable path forward?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[paultaylor]

I think your approach is generally right. But usually people want to move from compilations to original not original to compilations. With classic artists like the Beatles the same songs is available on so many compilations its just about impossible to match them back.

In the first instance SongKong groups songs by the folder they are in and assumes that one folder represents one album. So outside of SongKong you should move your partial/non-matched songs into a folder structure that you think best represents their album. Then rerun SomgKong again and hopefully get some more complete matches.

Also dont forget http://www.albunack.net this allows you to browse the database used by SongKong by artist, it lists both MusicBrainz and Discogs albums together so it can help you find the the right album. It shows single artist compilations but note it doesnt show various artist compilations.