After a number of releases with fairly small improvements to features and mostly bug fixes I’m really itching to make some more radical changes to SongKong
The 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 i have noticed some recurring themes:
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Customers enable rename files from metadata, 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.
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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.
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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
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Many customers only run Fix Songs one album at a time, with this scenario it would be useful if customer could check the result and confirm before changes made to file
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Profiles, a bit confusing that same profile can be used for different tasks. Would be clearer if profile match task, i.e Fix Songs profiles, Status Report profiles
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Customers find the number of options too confusing, but all options are useful for some scenarios so cannot remove them
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Customers requesting extra functionality for Fix Songs that could be done but would lead to it being more complicated
So what I would like to do is split up the functionality of Fix Songs so we have more but simpler tasks as follows:
- Fix Songs (Remove Rename Files)
- Import Naim Metadata
- Rename Files from Metadata
and add following tasks:
- Fix Album (Single album match with confirmation)
- Convert Bad ID3 Encoding (i.e Chinese to UTF8)
- Create MinimServer Artist Index
- Empty Folder Deleter
and also change profiles so they are per task, and instead of selecting the profile on main screen you would select once you select the task on a new page before you see the options for the task
The upshot of all this should be
- Individual tasks simpler with less options
- Clearer to customers what SongKong can do
- Easier for customers to combine tasks as required
Then after that is done I would like to add support for Beatunes and/or Bandcamp and Pdf images, But if I was to do this first then I would inevitably end up with an even more complex Fix Songs task.
Great to get some feedback on these ideas.