SongKong 9.0 Drukqs released 11th of May 2023

[paultaylor]

We are pleased to announce major release SongKong 9.0 Drukqs

A number of major changes in this release

Fix Songs Split into Multiple Tasks
The original concept behind Fix Songs was that with essentially one click SongKong could go away and sort out all your music, and this works well for many but over the years we have noticed some recurring themes:

-Customers enable rename files from metadata first time they run Fix Songs, and then not happy with results. There is a double whammy here, if the song metadata is not to customers liking then problem will be amplified if files are then renamed using the same metadata.

-Naim users moving from Naim hardware just want to use the Naim feature to only add the naim metadata back into the files, this is quite a different task to the usual musicbrainz/discogs matching.

-Customers wishing to just rename files, although Fix Songs can be configured to kind of just do this it will still do a few extra things, also the order folders are completed is not fixed and this can cause clashes when renaming files if customer has multiple copies of same album.

So we have now kept the core functionality of Fix Songs but now moved Naim Import Metadata, Rename Files and Delete Metadata fields (MetaGrater) into their own tasks. We also rejigged the code to make it much easier to add new tasks in the future.

Profiles confined to Particular Task
Previously any Profile (set of user preferences) could be used with any task, but this was confusing and it would be clearer if profile match task, i.e Fix Songs profiles, Status Report profiles ectera

We now have this!
When you select a task it then takes you to do a Select Profile screen that lets you select the profile to use (or clone/rename/delete profiles), the profiles listed are restricted to that task, each task has at least one default profile called Default

New Icons
We were struggling to find new icons for new tasks, and even the existing icons were not that well aligned to each other. So we have swapped to monochrome FontAwesome icons. This gives us a a much larger set of consistent icons, and a mechanism for getting new icons designed.

Remote Mode had a makeover
We have gone through our WebUI and made it more consistent and generally just nicer

Full List of Improvements

Release notes - SongKong - 9.0

Improvement

SONGKONG-1677 Edit Changes pages should be more like Google spreadsheet

SONGKONG-1828 Add separate File Renaming task

SONGKONG-2044 Add Elapsed Time as column to Reports Summary Page

SONGKONG-2174 Split Format tab into Format and Album Tab

SONGKONG-2352 Profiles should be per task, not shared between tasks

SONGKONG-2397 In Status report each problem reading an image is shown as two errors on Errors and Warnings tabs

SONGKONG-2400 Add Use Artist name from Recording instead of Track option

SONGKONG-2401 Use Artist Name instead of name on cover should only look at track not recording by default

SONGKONG-2403 Switch to use new FontAwesome Fonts

SONGKONG-2404 Remove Ignore metadata when matchignsingle song option

SONGKONG-2405 Modify Melco Lite License Creation

SONGKONG-2407 Add New Meta Grater task for deleting metadata

SONGKONG-2409 Default MP3 Metatag Version to Same as or v24

SONGKONG-2413 RemoteUI:Gui Improvements

SONGKONG-2417 Move some Save options into General Preferences

SONGKONG-2419 Add isPreview and Elapsed Time column to the reports page

SONGKONG-2420 Remove Wizard

Bug

SONGKONG-1550 Remote:Edit Metadata fields can go too small when on small screen sizes

SONGKONG-2392 Linux, memory should be set to a percentage of total memory like on other platforms

SONGKONG-2393 If filesystem problems Acoustid can throw uncaught exception when try to load file to fingerprint

SONGKONG-2394 Status Report on large set of files completed without error before all files processed

SONGKONG-2395 Status Report warning messages not clear what they are warning about

SONGKONG-2396 Status report hitting heap errors but message not shown in main page of report or reported to user

SONGKONG-2408 Add artwork in Remote mode doesnt seem to work reliably in Chrome/Safari on Mac

SONGKONG-2411 Plex rename mask doesnt support multi disc albums correctly

SONGKONG-2412 Remote UI:Add Artwork after added to dropzone and replace all doesn't always show mini version of image on each row

[paultaylor]

Sorry guys there was a problem with initial release, if you had previous version of SongKong installed and had installed a paid license it was wiping out the license. This was because we check for a particular file to exist to work out if you have new install or upgrade and the name of the file in this new version had changed so it was not detecting it in old versions and hence copying over default preferences and license file thinking it was a new install.

The workaround was to simply re-enter license details, but not ideal that you have to do that.

We have now fixed the issue and uploaded a new version of SongKong Drukqs.

[dario395]

Hi all, I am having an issue with update. My default profile is gone, and it prompts me to copy one over from “installation folder”. I’ve tried uninstalling, and reinstalling. There’s no way I can use the software without a profile, and I can’t seem to figure out how to create one without having a default profile already loaded in. Are you seeing this problem?

[Gwazh]

Is there an option to put fix songs back to the way it was? This new workflow is a major issue with how I use SongKong. I have looked in the interface but I can’t see any way to automate the now separate tasks without me manually running each step.

[paultaylor]

Bother, the fix I made last night has now exposed another issue if upgrading from earlier version SongKong is not copying over the new profiles needed for new release, working on fix now, but manual solution is as follows

Go to Installtion Folder, copy songkong.properties* files to config folder

For Windows it woulds be as follows

• Go to C:\Program Files\Jthink\SongKong

• Then App folder within that, and select songkong*.properties files

• Copy them to C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SongKong

e.g.

[paultaylor]

I’m assuming you just mean the file renaming, so instead of running

-Fix Songs

you have to run:

-Fix Songs
-Rename Files

Now if running over your whole library the new approach is alot safer way to do things.

If you are processing one album at a time then I can see it is a bit more cumbersome. Will soon add a version of Fix Songs for processing a single album, and this will allow rename as part of it. In the meantime if you want to process one album at a time, and doing alot of albums the solution might be to just run Rename Files once at the end over whole collection.

[Gwazh]

With how the app worked before I have a folder that all new music goes into. I would then run fix songs and move the music after fix songs into the library. Now I have to run fix songs on the folder, then run the move task, then run the remote duplicates if. This change added a step and for me it didn’t fix anything. While I understand someone could mess thier library up removing what was the core feature (one click fixing your library) all together with no way to re-enable is a bit extreme.

[paultaylor]

Hi, Delete Duplicates was never part of Fix Songs that was always a separate task. Now if you have music going into new folder over time you can use Watch Songs to monitor it, and Watch Songs still has the Move Folder option so it can move your files to a new folder (but it cannot rename them ie, change the subfolder/filename part)

The advantage of the new approach is it is now very easy to rename/reorganize all your songs without doing anything else. It also means we can consistently rename files without the problem of some files being modified as others being renamed.

The problem with the old approach was Fix Songs was too powerful, I did open this up for discussion before implmenting but didnt get much feedback - SongKong Software Development Roadmap

[usavaci]

Dear @paultaylor, In this release there are a lot of updates but I have some questions.

I have updated from the previous version to 9.0.1 but new sceme changes few stuff that I need to figure out.

1. In the previous version I have prepared few different templates for the file renaming but with this update I could not see these templates in the software like in the previous updates. Is there any way to recover or implement previous templates to the new version ?

I think have missed the templates in the file renaming. It looks like templates are present but still I am trying to figure out new version

2. The new version also reset the previous settings such as my “genre” settings which I do not remember very well. I have optimized my settings within years so I do not check this setting while fixing songs. Is there any way to get these settings? If I reinstall the previous version can I get these settings?

3. In the previous version I am happy with my file renaming settings while fixing the metadata. In the new version I have to do fixing and file renaming at two steps. Is there any way to do both file renaming and fixing at the same time ?

[paultaylor]

Hi,

1. The filename masks should have been preserved, and they are listed in Preferences as before, but now within the Filename masks tab

They are now used by Rename Files rather than Fix Songs, and can be selected from the Rename Files tab.

However in the initial version of SongKong 9, there was a bug that caused the filename mask file (renamemask.properties) to be overwritten, this was quickly fixed but unfortunately if you were an early adopter and it did delete the file there is nothing to be done unless you have a backup

This is not the original file stored in the installation folderm, but the version held in the user folder e.g C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SongKong on Windows

2. In previous version the profiles could be used for any task, now there are different profiles for different tasks. This meant it was not possible to reliably convert profiles because we did not know what task the profile was intended for.

However, the original profiles should still be in your user folder. They are named songkong[0-9].properties whereas the new fix songs profile files are called songkong_fixsongs[0-9].properties. So what you could do is open the songkong[0-9].properties in a text editor have a look for genre settings and copy them over to songkong_fixsongs[0-9].properties files.

3. No, for various reasons they are now two separate tasks. This is much more sensible when using SongKong on many albums at once. Now if fixing one album at a time then I can see argument for allowing both, so high priority is to add a single album matcher that would allow you to review changes and would include file renaming is wanted.