Why is SongKong not renaming my music ?

I had three different customers reporting that SongKong is not renaming their files for three completely different reasons so I thought it would be worth sharing this with everyone.

Rename Files From Metadata Not Enabled

By default SongKong does not rename files, in many ways it would make more sense for renaming to be the default so they reflect the new metadata added to them - however I have had too many occurrences of Jaikoz customers wondering where their files have gone to think this is a good idea.

The problem in this case was that although the customer had gone to the File naming tab and checked their rename and compilation masks

They had forgotten to actually check the Rename files based on metadata when matched on the Basic tab, this is required to actually do the rename.

iTunes Organizing Your Music Files

If you have configured SongKong to inform of iTunes of modifications then iTunes will can be kept up to date with metadata modifications, new songs added to iTunes and songs deleted. 

However within iTunes if you have Preferences:Advanced:Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized enabled whenever iTunes is informed of a change to a song it will rename the song based on the new metadata. This is okay if you are not using SongKong to rename your songs but if you are using SongKong to rename (or move) songs you should ensure this iTunes option is not enabled. 

Because SongKongs rename mechanism is much more advanced then iTunes and because SongKong logs the changes it makes I recommend not allowing iTunes to organize your media.
 

Songs not Renamed because not Matched

The final reason is because of the way SongKong works, when SongKong gets to the save stage it will only rename the file if it has been matched to MusicBrainz or Discogs, This is done by checking the MB_RECORDING_ID and DISCOGS_RELEASE_URL fields so even if the files were not matched during this run previously matched files can be renamed.

It wouldn't make much sense to rename songs that contained poor or non-existent metadata because their current filename may be the only means of identifying them. But you may have songs that SongKong has not matched to MusicBrainz or Discogs but other than that omission contain correct metadata and could be safetly renamed. I'm looking at adding an extra option ion SongKong for this scenario