SongKong 8.4 Gold released 14th July 2022

[paultaylor]

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 8.4 Gold

Artwork Improvements

This is a major release with important improvements to artwork.

Added support for retrieving the Back Cover

We can now get back cover as well as front cover album images, these are stored in the music files and can also be written as a back.jpg in the album folder.

Better Quality Artist/Band Photos

We can now get high quality artist artwork from FanArt.tv, before this release we only got artist artwork (e.g artist/composer.. ) from Wikipedia.

New Artwork types can be retrieved

We have extended the types of artist artwork we retrieve, we could already get artwork for Artist, Album Artist, Composer, Conductor, Lyricist and Orchestra fields if the album was identified. But now we can also get artwork for other Performers and also the Record Label Logo

MinimServer Integration

This becomes really useful if you are using MinimServer uPnP server because MinimServer can define an artworkIndex folder that can be used to find matching images for index elements. So if you have defined indexes for Conductors/Composers/Performers/Record Labels ectera you can use SongKong to save images to this folder using the Other Arwork:Add all artwork to MinimServer indexArtwork folder option, then MinimServer will read the values as they will be displayed by your uPnP Control Point

i.e Composers Index

i.e Labels Index

Independent image resizing for cover art /artist photos

We have split the Artwork tab into two tabs, and now you can independently set min/max image sizes for Cover Art and Artist Artwork, you can also decide if/how to write images to the filesystem

Apple Music/iTunes Fix

We also fix an issue with accessing Apple Music or iTunes, a security feature added to MacOS meant that SongKong could not get rights to communicate with Apple Music/iTunes.

With this fix the first time you run SongKong your Mac will display a popup message saying

"SongKong " wants access to control “Music”.Allowing control will provide access to documents and data in “Music”, and to perform actions within that app.

Select OK to allow access.

If you do not allow access SongKong will not be able to communicate with iTunes/Apple Music and therefore you should ensure that Basic:Save changes to ITunes is disabled

Bug

SONGKONG-2311 Not always possible to get Artist artwork from Wikipedia if artist name contains non ascii characters

SONGKONG-2308 Replace remaining references to http://jthink.net with https://jthink.net

SONGKONG-2307 Cannot invoke "String.toLowerCase()" because "attributes" is null

SONGKONG-2306 Naimmatcher:Cannot invoke "String.equals(Object)" because "trackArtist" is null

SONGKONG-2304 On Windows incorrectly labels iTunes as MacOS Music app

Improvement

SONGKONG-2325 Allow to set max/min image size for artist artwork independently to cover art

SONGKONG-2324 Split Artwork tab into Album Artwork and Artist Artwork to give enough space for new artwork options

SONGKONG-2316 Add support for reading back cover from Cover Art Archive

SONGKONG-2314 Get Label images from fanart.tv - useful for MinimServer Label index

SONGKONG-2313 Add support for getting artwork for performers, very useful if using MinimServer Perfromer index

SONGKONG-2312 Get better quality artist/composer/conductor ... artwork from fanart.,tv

SONGKONG-1918 Update Com4j Bridge to latest version and rebuild against latest iTunes

SONGKONG-2309 Not giving permissions when trying to access Apple Music first time