SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Will running SongKong again overwrite my changes?

#1

I took the plunge and purchased SongKong.

I ran it over my music and let it make some changes. At this point I chose not to update artwork and rename files. I wasn’t happy with some of the alterations, the genres are particularly bad (I assume that is the fault of Musicbrainz having duff info?).

I have spent some time going over my iTunes database and making further changes, not just genres but a whole heap of different stuff. I then wrote that back to the ID3 tag.

So… when I run SongKong again to update artwork, filenames etc is it going to overwrite all the alterations I have made?

#2

[quote=steve23094]I wasn’t happy with some of the alterations, the genres are particularly bad (I assume that is the fault of Musicbrainz having duff info?).
[/quote]
Genres aren’t enabled for MusicBrainz, only from Discogs (unless you have evidence to the contrary) so they shoudn’t be to bad, do you have some examples ?

[quote=steve23094]
I have spent some time going over my iTunes database and making further changes, not just genres but a whole heap of different stuff. I then wrote that back to the ID3 tag.

So… when I run SongKong again to update artwork, filenames etc is it going to overwrite all the alterations I have made?[/quote]

Interesting scenario, firstly SongKong doesn’t currently have an Update feature so if you rerun over all your files it will either try and rematch everything, or ignore everything already matched - this depends on if you have Match all songs, even if already matched. So rerunning SongKong on your files could modify the release it is matched to, I do have an issue for this http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-94.

I envisaged users either periodically running SongKong on their collection and being totally happy with the results (ignoring genres and artwork that can be disabled). Or running SongKong once on the files and then making manual additional edits and NOT rerunning SongKong against these files.

So assuming that we have the Update option as described in SONGKONG-94 is there an issue or not, I need to know what is the heap of different stuff you had to change, can yoiu give me some examples please.

#3

Hi,

I missed quite a few genres. eg. The Killer’s album Sam’s Town, tracks When You Were Young, Read My Mind and Bones were identified in MusicBrainz but not Discogs. So I understand why they are not there.

But I have now gone through in iTunes to fix heaps of ones like this, but eventually I wanted to run SongKong back over to add artwork and change filenames. Looks like I’m sh*t out of luck on that one, I don’t want to lose all the manual work I have put in. The reason I did it this way is if I ended up changing the album I wanted the correct folder path and artwork.

I tended not to like some of Discogs genre settings too, they were illogical in some cases (I understand this is out of your control). I have changed all these manually too.

There were also a number songs which linked to the correct album in the iTunes music store, but MusicBrainz linked them up to a different release like a compilation (I get that there is no way for SongKong to know which version it is). I have changed all these too.

So what I need I guess is the ability to run SongKong and only load artwork and change filenames.

Thinking about it as I type this if I re-enable ‘Keep iTunes Media folder organised’ (currently disabled as per your advice in the manual) and find some other program to get artwork, that will work won’t it? A feature I really liked about SongKong though was being able to set a minimum and maximum artwork size.

When SongKong pulls artwork does it base it on the AcousticID (or some such) or on the album title? After my manual corrections I would prefer it to be based on the album title.

Thanks.

#4

SongKong wont just delete information, it will only modify it. i.e say you had entered a barcode and SongKong matched your songs to an album without barcode information it will not delete your existing barcode, but if instead it had matched to an album with a different barcode then it would replace your barcode. Now if you disable the Update Genres option it will leave genres alone completely so I don’t think you have a problem here.

Okay this must be because of one of two scenarios:

  1. Since you are using iTunes I assume your songs are organized one folder per album. Therefore at least with the default options SongKong would only match songs to an album if EVERY song in the folder was matched to an album so if your songs from an original album were in one folder no songs would not be broken up and matched to different compilations albums unless you have disabled the Only allow match if all songs in folder matched to one album. In which case you could re-enable this option but if songs have now been moved to the incorrect compilation folders you could also load the folders into SongKong and select Undo to move them back to where they were and revert the incorrect modifications SongKong made (although your manual edits for these songs will also be lost)

  2. Alternatively the problem might be that although you say these are from the original album you do not actually have the complete album of songs just individual songs that you prefer to be matched to the original album rather than a compilation. Now if these are just individual songs there isn’t much context for SongKong to match to the correct album, but it does prefer original albums over compilations so it may be that the original album is not in the MusicBrainz database but compilations containing the song are which is why it matched to the compilation. Or it may be that you really do have a compilation version of the song rather than the original.

Let me know what the situation is

Change filename option only is coming, I havent considered the artwork option like that but I’ll think about it.

I’m not clear of the relevance of Keep iTunes Media folder organized to getting artwork, you could use Jaikoz this gives you the fine control you need and the trial version lets you save changes to twenty files in a session so you could try it out. But I’m hoping that my answers above show you can use SongKong to do what you want.

It does it on the Album Id, so the artwork is linked to the album that has been matched in Musicbrainz/Discogs rather the acoustid which could link to many versions of the recording on different albums. Album name is not sufficient as often different versions of the same album have different covers. So changing the album title would have no direct effect on finding artwork but it if SongKong is rematching the songs it would make it more likely that they matched to the correct album (because the album name is considered in the matching algorithm) and therefore getting the right album. But of course it cannot match to the right album if it does not exist in the MusicBrainz database (which is freely viewable and editable http://www.musicbrainz.org )

#5

Okay. I need to delete information now because SongKong has written incorrect ID info into my songs (see the mix up list below). I can’t run SongKing over again because it is going to overwrite my the manual changes I have now made. It will misidentifying my songs again.

Most of my songs are singles as opposed to whole albums. So it’s not that SongKong has split those up, rather it has identified a lot of them from compilation albums. iTunes on the other hand correctly picks them out when I right click and select ‘Show in iTunes Store’.

Yeah I didn’t make that clear, I was thinking out loud as I was typing. They have nothing to do with each other. Two separate issues, the filenames and the artwork. I have solved the filename issue by consolidating my iTunes library, but the missing artwork is still outstanding.

Cont. on second message because it’s too long.

#6

Cont. from previous message.

I now have an issue where SongKong has totally misidentified a number of songs. I don’t know whether it’s SK, the matching algorithm, or mix ups at MusicBrainz/Discogs. Now I have gone through to manually correct these I don’t entirely trust SK to get it right if I run it over again. You can see I am going through alphabetically and I have picked up quite a few mistakes by the letter ‘C’. All of the following were correctly titled before I started SK, then SK changed them to the wrong title. Format is (artist) / (original and correct title) - (the incorrect title that SK applied).

Adam Sandler / Ode to My Car - Crazy Love
Basement Jaxx / Where?s Your Head At - Get Me Off
Billy Joel / Honesty - Say Goodbye to Hollywood
Billy Joel / Uptown Girl - Pressure
Billy Joel / Innocent Man - The Stranger
Billy Joel / The Longest Time - The Entertainer
Billy Joel / Just the Way You Are - The Entertainer
Billy Joel / Only the Good Die Young - Say Goodbye to Hollywood
Black / Wonderful Life - Paradise
Blink 182 / Every Time I Look For You - Time to Break Up
Blue / Signed, Sealed, Delivered I?m Yours - Taste It
Bob Marley / Jamming - Natural Mystic
Bob Marley / Three Little Birds - So Much Things To Say
Bobby Darin / Splish Splash - Reason to Believe
Boyzone / When the Going Gets Tough - I Love the Way You Love Me
Bryan Adams / Summer of 69 - Straight From the Heart
Buddy Holly / All I Have To Do Is Dream - Listen to Me
Buddy Holly / Everyday - That’ll Be the Day
Chuck Berry / You Never Can Tell - Reelin’ and Rockin’
Corrine Bailey Rae / Put Your Records On - Trouble Sleeping
Culture Club / Do You Really Want to Hurt Me - Miss Me Blind
Cyndi Lauper / Time After Time - I’ll Kiss You

I hope this information help you improve SK.

Does this mean I need Jaikoz?

Thanks.

#7

Okay so I think your problem is a combination of the following:

  1. You are only matching singles (individual songs or a & b side ?) rather than album so there is less information for SongKong to use.

  2. That your songs do not actually contain a title, iTunes shows them as having a title but thats because iTunes just uses the filename as a title if there is no title but SongKong doesnt use this.

  3. So without any metadata or contextual folder information SongKong is relying on acoustids, but sometimes acoustids can match to multiple different recordings. Now when your song already has a title SongKong ensures it picks a recording whose title matches but if has no title then it tends towards the most popular recording match for that acoustid.

Now Ive found the problem acoustid for the first song in your list

https://acoustid.org/track/9fcc0c63-fb38-4e79-8208-542f015e7f8f

you can see it links to both:

Ode to My Car
Crazy Love

however Ode to My Car has more sources then Crazy Love so usually SongKong would pick Ode to My Car so I dont understand with the info I have why it has picked the wrong song. So it would help me alot if you could send me your support files (Help:Create Support Files) so I can get the complete picture including the log, the report and your user options.

If you have now manually entered the correct title I expect SongKong will match to the right song, what you can do is run SongKong in preview mode so it doesn’t make any changes and see what it does.

By all means try Jaikoz but I think your better off with SongKong

#8

Hi,

I have sent you the support files you requested, I hope they help.

I thought my files did have ID3 tags already, but I can’t be sure so you may have a point. I have since copied the iTunes data into into ID3s as I mentioned in an earlier post so I can’t be sure.

I’m running SK again in preview mode and now my songs definitely have ID3s so it should be interesting how it comes out. It may take a while so I will probably have to get back to you tomorrow with any results.

Thanks.

#9

Hi, its a combination of a few things but ultimately there is a bug and improvement that could be made to minimize the chances of this happening

  1. You did disable Only allow match songs if all songs in folder match to one album so this means that if SongKong is unable to match all the songs in one folder to a release (i.e album, single etc) it will continue on to just match songs individually to the correct song, picking the best release based on existing metadata for that song. If the song has no metadata then the release match is essentially random, as you are concerned about which release it matched to I’m a bit suprised you disabled this option. Then having run in preview which would have shown the problems you ran again in non-preview without making any further adjustments to the settings, however I understand you found the report difficult to navigate.

2.None of your songs did have the title field populated, and mostly had nothing except trackno/total, discno/total and release making it more difficult to match. You can confirm this as follows:

  • Open SongKong
  • From Reports menu select FixSongSReport00001.html
  • In report click on Song Changes
  • Select Music/Adam Sandler/What the Hell Happened to Me
  • Open Ode to my Car.m4a on right handside
  • You’ll see the changes are split into Fields Added and Fields Changed, fields are only listed in Fields Added if the file did not previously have a value for that field. As you can see almost all the fields are in the Fields Added section

This might not be the case for every file , but I checked quite a few and it was the case for all the ones I checked.

  1. So taking the Ode to my Car.m4a example why did SongKong match it to Crazy Love. Well actually its not an Acoustid problem because I can see from the output that no Acoustid was added (only an acoustic fingerprint) meaning that your version of that song was not known to AcoustId. So the match was done based on metadata, there wasn’t much of that but your song does (because derived from the audio) have track duration and track 3 (Ode to Car) is length of 3:55 and track 12 length is 3:57 (Crazy Love)

http://musicbrainz.org/release/40aaeea5-3a32-463c-a75e-8affcde52bb8

and i expect your track was slightly closer in duration to track 12 then track 3 and so that was the best scoring track. However your metadata also had track position and that would match Ode to Car.

So there is a bug here, I need to improve the matching, also if track has no title I should try using the filename if I had done both/either of these things this would have given a match

http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-623
http://jthink.net:8081/browse/SONGKONG-624

I will ensure both of these issues fixed for next release