On Friday 24th of February we jointly announced a new version of SongKong for Melco, simply called SongKong for Melco. Melco are recognised worldwide for their high quality music library
systems made with the highest quality audio specific components that
allow music to be stored in digital format and then streamed to a music
player or connected directly to a DAC
(Digital Audio Converter) for connection to a conventional hi-fi system.
This was announced at the Bristol Sound & Vision show, click here to view the press release.
Alan Ainslie from Melco, recognising the difficulty their customers had
with poor quality metadata from previously ripped and downloaded songs,
came to SongKong for help with devising a simple solution for customers.
In partnership with Melco we have already made many improvements for all
SongKong customers, especially those with large collections including
Classical and Jazz.
Additionally with SongKong for Melco we have
solved an issue for customers with collection of Naim wav rips. The
popular Naim Uniti defaults to ripping to Wav format, it then looks up
metadata from AllMusicGuide and Cddb. But this metadata
is stored in a file called amginfo.xml or cddb.txt within the same
folder as the wav rips for the album rather than stored within the Wav
files themselves. This is fine as long as
you only play them via Naim but if you copied the files anywhere else no
metadata would show up for the Wav files, regardless of if the
amginfo.xml or cddb.txt files
were copied as well since only Naim Uniti could parse them.
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When the above option is enabled if you have any Naim wav folders
that contain the Wavs and the Amginfo.xml/cddb.txt file then the
metadata can now be embedded into the Wav
files themselves, this can now be read and used by most applications
and players such as MinimServer and Foobar2000.
Of course
you can additionally use SongKongs standard MusicBrainz and Discogs
functionality to find additional metadata such as high resolution
artwork.
SongKong 4.6 released with a number of improvements.
Most notably the Rename files based on Metadata when Matched checkbox has now become a combo called Rename files based on metadata.
Previously SongKong would only rename files when your files were matched to either a MusicBrainz or Discogs release. This ensured we only renamed files when were sure we had a good match, we had album metadata and all the songs of the same release were matched.
But the drawback of this approach was that if you had songs with perfectly good metadata but not matched by SongKong then you could not use SongKong to rename them.
Also if SongKong could identify the song but just not decide on the release then again you could not use SongKong to rename them. This was a particular problem for DJ's where often the album metadata was not really important anyway.
Rename Files from Metadata Options
By default this option this set to No. It can be
very useful to name files based on the current metadata but this can cause problems
for any other applications that index files by their file name. For example if you
are using a music manager application and rename a file that is under the music
managers control then it will not be able to find it, it is usually better to use
SongKong on songs before adding them to a music manager. But if you are using iTunes
then SongKong can inform of iTunes of changes that SongKong makes so that iTunes does
not lose the file.
This option is not simply Yes or No, you can decide to rename songs based on how and/or.if
they have been matched. Often the best choice is Yes if matched
to a release this ensures that songs are only renamed if matched to a
MusicBrainz or Discogs release, this in turn ensures that complete albums of songs
are renamed and therefore kept together.
Alternatively the Yes if matched to a release or
song option can be used, this additionally allows songs that have been
matched to a MusicBrainz song but not a release. This ensures that all the songs
renamed will have reliable basic metadata, but if you have a folder of songs
representing an album and they have only been matched to a song it could cause them
to be put into different folders.
The Yes if has metadata option allows any song to
be renamed even if not matched by SongKong as long as it contains the basic metadata
of Title, Album and
either Artist or Album
Artist. This option allows SongKong to be used for any collection of
songs even when the songs could not be found in the MusicBrainz or Discogs
databases.
The Yes, for all files option takes this a step
further allowing any song to be renamed regardless of the status of it's existing
metadata.
