Just in time for Xmas, new releases of Jaikoz and SongKong

We are pleased to announce the release of Jaikoz 9.1.0 and SongKong 4.3 today

Classical Feature Parity

We have made lots of improvements to classical matching in SongKong, but even better the whole classical matching functionality has now been added to Jaikoz. Classical matching now works the same in both applications and all the Classical music options that were in SongKong are now in Jaikoz as well.

 

Support for iTunes Work and Movement fields

Recently iTunes added support for Work, Movement and Movement No. SongKong already had support for deriving this information from classical releases but now it writes this information to the equivalent iTunes fields so you can now use SongKong to update these new columns for your classical releases. And even better news is that Jaikoz does this as well.

We will explain how this works in more detail in another blog post.

 

New Field Mappings

These it is quite customary to transcode music collections from lossless to lossy so that you have a high quality version of your music for your hi-fi system and smaller files for use on your iPod or car stereo. 

We have noted that transcoders such as dbPoweramp do an excellant job of converting the audio, and a reasonable job of converting the metadata for the standard fields like album, artist and title. But they dont do such a good job of converting custom fields such as MusicBrainz Ids or the classical fields we have recently added such because they expect the fieldname to be exactly the same on all metadata formats. For MusicBrainz Ids this is not the case, i.e the MusicBrainzReleaseId field is called MusicBrainz Album Id for Mp3 and Aiff files but MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID for Flac and Ogg files. 

We cannot change how MusicBrainz Ids are stored but we have revised the mappings for some of our recently added new classical fields in order to make it easier for metadata to be maintained when the files are transcoded.

This means in Jaikoz  you many notice that some fields seem to be empty when you load them, just run Update Metadata from MusicBrainz to re-add the data to the newly mapped fields.

 

Acoustid Song Only Metadata

The Acoustid database is crowd-sourced and when songs are submitted to Acoustid they are submitted with their metadata. If this none of the songs submitted for a particular Acoustid fingerprint include a MusicBrainz Id then the Acoustid is not linked to MusicBrainz but the basic metadata - artist, album and title are available from Acoustid 

Now when a song is matched to an Acoustid with no links to MusicBrainz metadata but with some basic metadata we use this metadata if our song doesn't already contain that information. In the SongChanges part of the report such songs are labelled (Acoustid Song Only)

This is great when your songs contained no metadata since the Acoustid database is larger than the MusicBrainz database. Also there are some songs that are in both Acoustid and MusicBrainz databases but not currently linked so adding this metadata increases the chance of your songs being matched to MusicBrainz by metadata (and Discogs).

 

When tracks contains featured artists

We have also added the When tracks contains featured artists option to Jaikoz this give you options when a track lists both a main artist and featured artists.