I read your thread on Songkong and I find it very interesting mostly because I could tag my whole library in one step. I understand that there are no preferences to change, so for example I could not prefer original release to compilations, correct? That would be a pity. Will Songkong be free to use for Pro users? Thanks.
Songkong, same results as Jaikoz?
There are preferences (just not as many) and instead of accessing through the Preferences menu they are accessible everytime you run Fix Songs, give it a test run.
No, it will not be free for Pro users - its a new product, I do have to make a living somehow !
DO NOT DUMP A LARGE CHUNK OF YOUR COLLECTION INTO SONGKONG!
It is still in Beta and you might get some changes that you didn’t want!
With that said, make some copies of some albums and try it out. If things are completely unfiled, feel free to edit them as it won’t really damage them, it just might put them in the wrong folder or mistag something. For a jaikoz user, this is all easy to repair. I’ve been using it heavily for two days now and I’ve never gotten to a place I don’t want to be.
If you are experienced in Jaikoz, you might find yourself annoyed with the lack of control (I am 
_). It IS a one-button fix, but once you hit “go”, that’s it, no guidance.
I think most avid Jaikoz users know who exactly who this is pointed at:
- It’s the guys at work/friends who ask “What do you use to get all that info in there?”, so you point em to the Jaikoz trial and they give up after about 10 minutes.
- The iTypes who want better info but want something “automatic”.
- The Wife! “I don’t need to know all this! Just make it pretty!”.
Once the bugs are worked out, I think this will be fabulous, and might even act as a “halo” product for Jaikoz (I don’t know why it gets so little attention, maybe it needs a sex-tape). I’m already using the beta with ‘regular’ releases and then throwing them in Jaikoz for finishing touches, and there isn’t much else to add; All the MBIDs and AcoustIDs are already there, along with all the basic tags you’d expect.
Keep in mind that’ you can’t use it to change artwork, label things “EP” or “Remastered”, or edit genres. It’s a “match this” and that’s it.
[quote=dkoh]DO NOT DUMP A LARGE CHUNK OF YOUR COLLECTION INTO SONGKONG!
It is still in Beta and you might get some changes that you didn’t want!
[/quote]
Yes I advise on http://www.jthink.net/songkong/ to backup your files before editing in SongKong
Yes it is one click, but before you click there are 5 tabs of options you can modify so you still have a fair bit of control. What options are you missing, if there is demand I can add some in.
It is aimed at these users, but it is also aimed at customers like yourself as a two stage process, autocorrect in SongKong, then make fine modifications/edits in Jaikoz.
Thanks, thats good to know
[quote=dkoh]
Keep in mind that’ you can’t use it to change artwork, label things “EP” or “Remastered”, or edit genres. It’s a “match this” and that’s it.[/quote]
You mean manually change artwork ?
You can add (EP) to the release title using the 'Add EP …" option on the Format tab
[quote=paultaylor][quote=dkoh]
If you are experienced in Jaikoz, you might find yourself annoyed with the lack of control (I am _). It IS a one-button fix, but once you hit “go”, that’s it, no guidance.
[/quote]
Yes it is one click, but before you click there are 5 tabs of options you can modify so you still have a fair bit of control. What options are you missing, if there is demand I can add some in.[/quote]
It’s the mental thing of hitting Fix and watching those green bars and wondering what it’s going to spit out, whereas in Jaikoz you see everything before it saves. It’s just something to get used to, not a ‘lack of feature’ thing. New users who have never used Jaikoz will probably experience none of this.
[quote=paultaylor][quote=dkoh]
Keep in mind that’ you can’t use it to change artwork, label things “EP” or “Remastered”, or edit genres. It’s a “match this” and that’s it.[/quote]
You mean manually change artwork ?
You can add (EP) to the release title using the 'Add EP …" option on the Format tab [/quote]
You’re at the mercy of whatever artwork MB gives you. If it’s scratchy, faded, small, wrong, missing, there’s no way to change it in SK.
Yeah, I forgot about the EP setting. SK does use the values from the release “Type” from MB. Things that I usually add to the release tag are (Remastered) and (Special Edition). This is when I have both original and remastered or deluxe copies from my favorite artists (like the Megadeth collection). This isn’t necessary for most users, but if I don’t relabel them, XBMC will see them as one giant release with duplicate songs. I would suggest this as a new feature, but MB disambiguation isn’t all that great. XBMC is working on reading MBID from tags soon anyway, so this task might go away for me.
I don’t want anyone to think I was badmouthing SK. That is not the case, and I was merely giving a warning to Jaikoz users that things may be different than what you’re used to. Last night I ran an artist folder with 9 albums, all mixed MP3, FLAC, and WMAs, and was expecting things to get messy. It ran through all of them except for one track that had a large time discrepancy. Dropped them straight into Jaikoz and everything looked as it should. I was very impressed.
[quote=dkoh][It’s the mental thing of hitting Fix and watching those green bars and wondering what it’s going to spit out, whereas in Jaikoz you see everything before it saves. It’s just something to get used to, not a ‘lack of feature’ thing. New users who have never used Jaikoz will probably experience none of this.
[/quote]
Ah, yes this a key feature of Jaikoz that stopped me writing something like SongKong before until I had the idea of changes being saved, but then letting you revert them a later date. The funny thing is so many users of Jaikoz don’t bother to check the songs before saving anyway.
[quote=dkoh] You’re at the mercy of whatever artwork MB gives you. If it’s scratchy, faded, small, wrong, missing, there’s no way to change it in SK.
[/quote]
You can set a minimum size allowed, but as artwork is so important I think an option thats says add artwork or not would be useful http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-39 .Both SongKong and Jaikoz will have support for the new Cover Art Archive soon which does generally have high quality images (look for an announcement from MusicBrainz next week).
Yes MB doesnt have special release types for these anyway so would be very difficult to do this accurately from disambuguation, but this kind of scenerio is better suited to Jaikoz anyway.
[quote=dkoh]
I don’t want anyone to think I was badmouthing SK. That is not the case, and I was merely giving a warning to Jaikoz users that things may be different than what you’re used to. Last night I ran an artist folder with 9 albums, all mixed MP3, FLAC, and WMAs, and was expecting things to get messy. It ran through all of them except for one track that had a large time discrepancy. Dropped them straight into Jaikoz and everything looked as it should. I was very impressed.[/quote]
I don’t think anyone is thing that, your comments are very fair and very constructive.
It seems very nice, for me the most interesting option of SK is that you can throw your whole collection at it (150,000 files maybe?). But back to the original question: Will Songkong give same results as Jaikoz in matching? Better, worse?
Similar but not identical.
There are two facets to matching:
- What song/releases have the song been matched to
- What information is taken from your match, and stored in your file.
1.So the matching algorithm is very similar to that used by Jaikoz for Match to MusicBrainz with Group by Folder Only enabled, if no match is found it then similar to Match to Discogs. But its not identical, but of course its not identical from one Jaikoz release to another.
- SongKong should extract the same data as Jaikoz in the main. but it doesn’t currently extract genres as the quality of these is questionable. There may be other minor differences but these are more likely to be bugs than be intentional.