Introduction
SongKong is a music organization and tagger application designed to simplify the task of managing your digital music collection. SongKong is an easy-to-use application that can be used to match your songs from online databases and updates your songs with the correct information from these databases, including artwork. SongKong can even match songs that have no metadata using audio fingerprinting. SongKong can reorganize and rename your songs based on this information, additionally if you use iTunes this is updated as well.
If you are like most collectors of digital music, your collection has likely grown over time, gathered from a variety of different sources. There are likely some discrepancies among your music collection, whether it is missing artist information or album art, multiple copies of the same song, or inconsistently or unnamed audio files. SongKong has been designed to resolve all of these issues. Music metadata is the information embedded in your audio files and used by a wide variety of devices (mobile phones, mp3 players, etc.) and apps to identify your music. This includes information such as song title, band or artist name, the album the song comes from, album track number, the type of music (also known as genre), the year the song was released and much, much more. SongKong adds this information to your music collection.
The concept behind SongKong is that your songs can be identified automatically, and if this is done carefully you get a complete and consistent music library. However we realize that 100% music identification is not quite a reality for most of us so SongKong also provides manual and automated metadata editing as well.
SongKong is available for a large number of platforms:
- MacOS M1
- MacOS Intel
- Windows
- Linux
- Docker, Synology
- Docker, Qnap
- Docker, Unraid
- Melco Digital Music Library
SongKong provides tasks that can run againsts selected folders, this could be a single album or our whole music collection. This is an important feature of SongKong that unlike other products you do not have to work one album at a time, even when automatching your music.
Each task has a number of options, and combinations of options can be stored in Profiles so they can be reused, when you select a task you are then presented with the Select Profile screen, this allows you to select a predefined profile or create a new profile to use.
The Status Report task is a very useful tool for taking a snapshot of your music collection, it is recommended you run this task before anything else. It has two main features, it creates a metadata completeness report and a spreadsheet of your songs existing metadata.
To automatically identify and add metadata to your songs with SongKong you simply have to select the music folder you would like to have reorganized and tagged and then select Fix Songs task, review the options and select Start . SongKong then matches the selected songs to the Albunack Server - matching your songs and adding artwork. There is no limit to the number of songs you can update at one time.
Then Rename Files task can be used to rename or move the music files themselves
The Auto Edit task can be used to batch modify your files with edits such as capitalization, find and replace and trim, it vcan be used on multiple fields in one go.
We also have Naim Import Metadata task, this is for Naim customers that have a wav music file collection. Naim Music servers store the Wav metadata in separate proprietry files and this tasks allow those files to be read and the metadata added into the music files so that the metadata can be used by other music servers.
And MetaGrater task for deleting particular metadata fields.
You can also easily find duplicate songs in your collection with the Delete Duplicate Songs task.
After any task has completed a detailed report is generated containing details of everything that has been changed.
If any task modifies your files and you don’t like the results, you can selectively undo changes at folder level at any time. All changes are stored in SongKong internal database so simply start SongKong and select the folder (or sub folder) you modified and select Undo Fixes task.
Additionally you can configure a Watch Folder task and then SongKong will detect when folders are added to the watch folder and fix them automatically.
For those songs not identified you can also apply manual edits even via your browser with Edit Songs task.
Desktop Mode
SongKong is usually used as desktop application for your Mac, Windows or Linux computer, this is the default when you start SongKong. The only exception is that Linux cannot automatically update iTunes since iTunes is not available for Linux.
Remote Mode
In Remote Mode you can control SongKong from a remote device using a regular web browser, and this could be another computer, iPad or mobile phone.
This means having installed SongKong on your computer you can then use it from another location in your home, for example your computer may in your home office but you can control from your phone in your lounge. But it also means you can install and use SongKong on a computer that does not have a Graphical User Interface such as a Linux server, and unlike the command line tool you have full access to all user options and administrative tasks such as license installation. The Remote Mode means you can install SongKong on the same machine as your music resides on so that the actual file updating does not have to be done over the network meaning much faster matching, especially with large lossless files.
The Remote Mode user interface has been designed to look as much like the desktop mode as possible, whilst being adaptable to the different screen sizes of computers and mobile devices.
For simplicity most screenshots from this tutorial will show screenshots from the remote mode version.
Remote Mode can be invoked either by starting SongKong from the command line with the -r option or by starting in regular desktop mode and selecting Start Remote Mode from the File menu.
Cmdline Mode
You can also run SongKong as a command line tool, this means it can be included as part of an automated scripted solution, great for Linux servers.