The first time we run SongKong on our music collection it is going to get a lot of good album matches, and some song only matches. Exactly what, really depends on the makeup of your music collection but typically 80% album matches, 10% song only matches and 10% not matched.
Is there any point in running again ?
Yes, for three reasons:
Firstly, on the first run matches to Acoustid song only or MusicBrainz Song Only add limited metadata to your files and this maybe enough second time round to allow full album match.
Secondly, the online databases we use are continually getting updated so may provide matches that were not there before.
Thirdly, because the same online databases are continually improving their metadata we may get increased metadata (e.g catalogno, performers) added for songs we have already matched.
Options that effect reruns
On the Basic tab there are two options that are important when re-running Fix Songs
For songs already matched Option
With the default Update Metadata Only option SongKong will only try to match songs that have not already been matched to MusicBrainz previously, but it will update existing matches with the latest data or make adjustments based on customer preferences. For example if Update Artwork was disabled when originally matched and it is now enabled SongKong will check for artwork without modifying the releases that the songs have already been matched to, this is usually the best option to use.
If the option is Rematch then SongKong disregards any matching previously done by SongKong or any other MusicBrainz enabled tagger such as Jaikoz and rematches from scratch. Enabling this option means Fix Songs will take significantly longer to run but is useful if there are problems with the existing matches.
If the option is Ignore then SongKong ignores any songs already matched to MusicBrainz albums and does not process them any further. Note that songs matched to a MusicBrainz song only or a Discogs album are not ignored because for these songs we still do not have the desired match to a MusicBrainz album. Enabling this option is best if we want to run Fix Songs as quickly as possible without spending any time on already matched albums.
Ignore songs previously checked that could not be matched
When SongKong processes any song with Fix Songs it always adds a SONGKONG_ID field. This means on subsequent attempts we can recognize files that we have seen before. With this option we can skip over the songs that we have processed before but could not match instead of another attempt to match them. This speeds up the processing time by not wasting time trying to rematch songs that didn’t match first time and probably will not be matched second time round, such as Audiobooks since our matching libraries are music focused.