SongKong is creating a pseudo-album for each song in an album

[entropic]

UPDATE: now that I’m looking over the changes in Picard, it looks like SongKong is doing this for EVERY ALBUM… even albums it says it has matched perfectly. This is on a batch of like 250 albums I ran yesterday, so yeah, that’s not great. So until this is resolved, I’m forced back to Picard.

---

I’ve gone over all the settings I can think of, read the forums, etc, but I’m still getting this issue. So at this point I need you to take a look at my settings and tell me what I’m doing wrong

I came across this post that looks similar to what I’m experiencing, but there wasn’t a solution in there unfortunately.

This doesn’t happen for every album, but when it does, SongKong will “latch onto” a single track name, and rename EVERY TRACK to that and then wrap it in an album folder etc. There are a lot of moving parts to SongKong and even though I do my fair share of programming, I’m totally lost as to what is causing this issue.

Anyway, when I ran it last night, it totally nuked my library so I had to roll things back. Obviously I don’t want a repeat of that! I’ve attached the log files as requested.

[paultaylor]

Hi, thankyou received your files and can see the problem in RenameFiles0019 report but I’m struggling to see why it is happening at the moment. One thing that is confusing me that I hope you can help with is the artists in FixSongs00018 seem to be completely different to the artists renamed in RenameFiles00019 even though rename is moving songs from the /Volumes/Media/MusicStaging folder that we processed in FixSongs00018, why is that?

[paultaylor]

Oh I see, in FixSongs00018 they are organized by album without an album artist folder

So for example if you look at the first folder in RenameFilesReport it is for A Tribe Called Quest, and within that there are many folders starting Midnight Marauders,

If you look at FixSongsReport000018 browse by Album Artist/Album we see there are many songs with the same wong metadata

but they were already matched to this, SongKong has not added anything.

I think the issue is that Picard has already matched them incorrectly, and because they are already matched with MusicBrainz Ids then SongKong does not attempt to rematch them.

Please try rerunning Fix Songs but with For Songs Already matched set to Rematch

Then rerun Create Support Files so I can check the results.

[entropic]

Wonderful. Will do. But to clarify: this album (and all the other albums with this issue) was only touched by SongKong and probably iTunes many years ago. So no Picard here. What might be looking like a Picard mismatch is either a SongKong mismatch or iTunes funkiness. But I’ll rerun following your instruction for that exact album and report back!

[entropic]

Okay I’ve rerun Fix Songs on that album with that setting changed and generated the report.

[entropic]

Hey Paul. So far things are looking good. I’ve still got to look over more albums before I say it’s all good, but whatever went wrong the first time I ran this last night seems to be fixed now with the “Rematch” setting, which is WONDERFUL.

One unrelated question: I’ve gone through all the documentation I can find, but im not clear on how to set my classical settings up to force ALBUMARTIST to just be the composer rather than composer;orchestra or whatever.

[paultaylor]

Great.

Regarding Classical don’t have such an option since historically composer not involved in the actual album and therefore shouldn’t usually be album artist.

But you could do it by using Scripter - but need to consider what albumartist should be when album has works by different composers since it is a must that whatever it is the albumartist must be the same for all tracks on the album.

[entropic]

Huh. Okay. So how would you recommend handling classical albums? I’m definitely not super well-versed so I can’t think “I would love to listen to XXX’s recording of XYZ’s performance of YYY’s Symphony no. 3” so I need breadcrumbs to find stuff I’m looking for.

As for my original issue: I’ve run across a couple albums this has happened to even with the “rematch” setting on. They were albums that songkong didn’t match… pretty sure they were the old Ska compilations in the logs I’ll send you right now in case it’s something you can help me with or fix on your end in the unlikely event it’s NOT my fault lol.

UPDATE: I thought I could load a previous Fix Songs log and generate a report that way. But actually I’m pretty sure the info is in the log files I sent you. Look for the unmatched Discogs albums, specifically “Ska: the second wave” which if I remember correctly is the one that this happened to again.

[entropic]

EDIT: let me know how I can best scan for this issue BEFORE doing a RenameFiles action which is where things get most disruptive. Before I do RenameFiles, it’s super easy for me to fix stuff in Picard (although my obvious preference would be to figure out the root issue and have it all done using SongKong).

Spoke too soon. After doing test imports of maybe 50 albums I went for a big one and there are a ton of albums coming in with the same issue. Initially I thought it was just live or comps, but no I’m getting this issue with a number of albums. Again, all of these are in the logs I sent you but I’ll also send you the logs for the last file rename/import action where all this becomes very obvious.

A few of the albums that have this issue:
imperial bedroom
from her to eternity
I heard they suck live
nevermind
riddim warfare

[paultaylor]

@entropic

Huh. Okay. So how would you recommend handling classical albums? I’m definitely not super well-versed so I can’t think “I would love to listen to XXX’s recording of XYZ’s performance of YYY’s Symphony no. 3” so I need breadcrumbs to find stuff I’m looking for.

It depends on your music player but the composer will be added to the Composer field which is commonly supported and we also add the Work to the Work field (which is less well supported). So if you want to play by composer, simplay use the composer field.

e.g this is the Browse By Composer view of one of your reports.

@entropic

let me know how I can best scan for this issue BEFORE doing a RenameFiles action which is where things get most disruptive. Before I do RenameFiles, it’s super easy for me to fix stuff in Picard (although my obvious preference would be to figure out the root issue and have it all done using SongKong).

You are quite correct, want to sort the metadata issues before renaming files because that makes things worse.

Okay so I thought you would be able to see these problem releases in the report by going to Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Only One Song matched.

But as you can see nothing listed. Unfortunately the problem is that this list is generated by the Matched to MusicBrainz section of report, and this section only shows albums that have actually been matched to by SongKong, and these problem albums were not rematched by SongKong but they do have MusicBrainz Ids from previous time so they are not listed. This is a bit confusing and I may have to change something.

So I think this will work

Start Metagrater task and add MB Recording Id, MB Release Group Id, MB Release Id, MB Track Id to remove these ids.

Re-run Fix Songs, then check the Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Only One Song matched section, and if now lists some albums match them one by one using Match To One Album task.

Edit:Alternative
I think the problem with Matched to MusicBrainz Release is only issue when rematching, if you temporarily set For Songs Already Matched to Update Metadata Only and rerun Fix Songs then the Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Only One Song matched should list the albums we we were unable to fix.

[paultaylor]

Raised issue for consideration.

[entropic]

I like the functionality you’re proposing in the issue you just posted a lot. Having to know ahead of time which FixSongs profile to run (e.g. your “Alternative” method above) isn’t realistic at least with how I’m doing things, so knowing this issue can’t ever be hidden from the user would be super helpful.

Along these same lines, I think it would be massively helpful to incorporate conditional highlighting [in red] for important errors, like this. I’m super visual and when I first started using songkong I was TOTALLY overwhelmed by the options, reports etc… and in the reports it was all just a blur of light blue links everywhere. Now after spending many hours with the app this is a bit less of an issue, but until you mentioned it I still wasn’t paying any attention to any of the Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies or Discogs etc… but if those links turned red when there were issues I’m 100% certain I would have investigated them to understand what the issue was. So yeah I’m throwing in a HUGE +1 for conditional highlighting for important errors.

@paultaylor

It depends on your music player but the composer will be added to the Composer field which is commonly supported and we also add the Work to the Work field (which is less well supported). So if you want to play by composer, simplay use the composer field.

I use PlexAmp and afaik there’s no easy way to see composer info, at least in the iOS app. Please correct me if I’m wrong because it would be wonderful to have access to this tag!

[entropic]

OMFG I just looked through that initial report under the Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Only One Song matched section and if I had seen this (conditional highlighting) and fully understood what was happening (unlikely until I knew there was an issue) this would have saved me HOURS of troubleshooting and later cleanup. Holy crap. Funny how much time you could save previous you with the knowledge present you has gained lol.

[paultaylor]

@entropic

Having to know ahead of time which FixSongs profile to run (e.g. your “Alternative” method above) isn’t realistic at least with how I’m doing things

Yes it was just a temporary workaround to resolve your current issues rather than a general purpose way to do things.

But the Metagrater method is probably better.

@entropic

se links turned red when there were issues I’m 100% certain I would have investigated them to understand what the issue was

I take your point, however the title is background is Yellow this indicates a warning, because we cant know for sure it is an error. For example if you only actually have one song of an album then it is not really an error.

If there was no issues then the section would not even be displayed, so if the section is there this indicates there are potential issues that should be checked.

The hyperlinks are blue because they are hyperlinks, and by default hyperlinks are blue.

@entropic

I use PlexAmp and afaik there’s no easy way to see composer info, at least in the iOS app. Please correct me if I’m wrong because it would be wonderful to have access to this tag!

I don’t use it but if Plexamp doesnt support Composer field I would sggest it is not really a viable tool for playing Classical music.

[paultaylor]

Well I suppose bootstrap does support coloured hyperlinks so I could consider changing them to Yellow (Warning)

[entropic]

@paultaylor

I take your point, however the title is background is Yellow this indicates a warning…

The hyperlinks are blue because they are hyperlinks, and by default hyperlinks are blue.

Gotcha. I’m commenting as a new user not an expert. Your app is very powerful but frankly somewhat overwhelming. I didn’t even notice that different tabs/links appear or disappear depending on the data returned. I’m not spending an hour pouring over each report… I just want to tag my library properly, know if there are issues, and go about my day.

What I was referring to with the conditional isn’t specific colors… yellow is totally fine, and now that I know what I’m looking for it makes perfect sense when I’m already on that page. What I am taking a bit of an issue with and pushing back on, is the top level link… so sure if I’m a SongKong expert I would notice "hey Summary:MusicBrainz Inconsistencies:Only One Song just popped up, better look into that. But for a filthy casual such as myself, there’s no way I’ll have the entire UI memorized. Sure I’ll know to look for this particular link now but it would’ve been helpful to have say a yellow background highlight in the main summary page. Basically IMO, anything like “inconsistencies”, “errors”, “warnings” etc should be called out to the user in the top level so casual users don’t have to literally read each thing searching for any issues. This is a suggestion (not an attack) from a new user who spent hours troubleshooting a probably outlier issue that would be obvious to an experienced songkong user.

@paultaylor

The hyperlinks are blue because they are hyperlinks, and by default hyperlinks are blue.

Lol nice snark. The links here are being used in a very specific way, therefore could be handled in a slightly different way. But your app, your call of course

[paultaylor]

@entropic

Lol nice snark. The links here are being used in a very specific way, therefore could be handled in a slightly different way.

No snark intended. it didnt occur to me that it could be okay to have different colours for some links until I saw they could be changed on Bootstrap to have different coloured hyperlinks for different reasons - I have always had them consistent over the site

But I think the issue is we need some possibly coloured links on the main summary page such as the text highlighted blue in screenshot below

Added this issue to consider further.

[entropic]

Yes. That would be AWESOME!

I also think it would be incredibly helpful to conditionally call out warnings/inconsistencies in the top level tabs of the summary to make it obvious to noobs there’s something to at least look into. It would make parsing the report super fast because no highlight = no worries. But if a warning/inconsistency is highlighted, it’s something to look into. This would be even more important for stuff that doesn’t disappear.

I just grabbed a random report to show what I’m talking about. Just glancing at this FixSongs report as it’s presented now, I wouldn’t know there was a possible issue (maybe there’s an indication YOU would see but as a noob, to me it just looks like a report without any issues), however, there are Discog inconsistencies but there aren’t musicbrainz ones. This wouldn’t be obvious to me. Anyway, I just manually highlighted the text and took screenshots, but you could do whatever you wanted to do color/style-wise. The different screenshots just make it super obvious what I’m trying to say here. You WOULDN’T have musicbrainz conditionally highlighted here since there aren’t any issues, but you WOULD have Discogs highlighted because there are.

If you did this, it makes sense to me that you should use the yellow inside the actual tab as the highlight color to keep things unified.

[paultaylor]

How are you getting on with resolving the intial problem anyway?

[entropic]

Hard to say. I brute forced though the issues by manually cleaning up the problem albums using Picard.

That said, once I made the changes you suggested and reran FixSongs the problem went from hundreds of albums to a handful. I’m still not sure exactly what the cause is/was but it was manageable after the settings changes. I would say it happened to maybe 5 albums in my final run. If it’s something you want to research let me know how I can help and I can rerun FixSongs on a duplicate backup of untouched albums or whatever.

I also want to thank you for the solid support and even with the issues I had SongKong saved me hours of drudgery