A bug was introduced into SongKong 4.9 that affected a few of you. If you have:
- Rename Files enabled
- Include album name as a part of your rename mask
- Have albums that contain '.' character in their name
it can cause SongKong to go into an endless loop, so we needed to get that fixed.
We also fixed an issue whereby if a songs could not be loaded from a folder it could prevent any other songs being loaded from the same folder.
We also fixed some issue in the reports.
- The Matched to MusicBrainz Song Only links were broken
- The report was missing blue section dividers
- The summary chart did not correctly label Matched Song only and Matched to Acoustid Song Only part of the MusicBrainz bar when hovering over the bar
Today we provide a sample MinimServer configuration that provides the functionality discussed in parts 1 - 10.
You should consider your existing configuration and your own particular circumstances but essentially if you are running MinimServer on a local computer you simply:
- Open MinimServer properties tab
- Copy and Paste the values below for the correct fields
- Run Rescan
To modify the configuration of MinimServer running on a remote system such as a Melco N1 you need to:
- Install MinimWatch
- Connect to the Melco instance
- Open MinimServer properties tab
- Copy and Paste the values below for the correct field
- Run Rescan
aliasTags
artists:-artist
indexTags
MusicBrainz Album Type:Album Type, Artist, All Artists, Album_Artists, BPM, +Date, +OriginalDate:Original Date, Choir, Composer, Conductor, Ensemble, Genre, Instrument, is_classical=1:Is Classical, is_classical_copy=0:Is Non Classical,Orchestra, Performer_name:Performer,Overall_work:Work,
itemTags
composersort, conductor_sort, artists_sort, albumartistsort,album_artists_sort, choir_sort, ensemble_sort, orchestra_sort, performer_name_sort
tagOptions
Date.yearOnly.index,OriginalDate.yearOnly.index
tagValue
Composer.value.sort={ComposerSort},Conductor.value.sort={Conductor_Sort},artist.value.sort={artists_sort},albumartist.value.sort={albumartistsort},album_artists.value.sort={album_artists_sort},Choir.value.sort={choir_sort}, Ensemble.value.sort={ensemble_sort},Performer_name.value.sort={performer_name_sort},is_classical_copy.default={is_classical}
Giving something similar to
Part 11: MinimServer Configuration
Part 9: Is Classical and other boolean fields
All Albums
MinimServer identifies songs to be part of the same album if they have the same value for the AlbumArtist field and Album field.
By default MinimServer does this check at a folder level but if your albums are organized so they traverse multiple folders you can find matching albums in different folders by setting mergeFolderAlbums to true. But I would certainly advice that unless you have a very good reason you should organize albums so that each is stored in a different album folder that is within an album artist folder.
Multidisc Albums
The same applies for Multidisc albums but MinimServer is also clever enough to identify if you have each disc in a separate folder within a main folder without you having to set mergeFolderAlbums to true. You need to ensure the discno and trackno fields are completed as well, but they always are if identified with SongKong.
But by default MinimServer displays all the tracks on the release as if they are on a single disc.
So here we have actually have a 2 disc release, the first disc has 17 tracks and the second disc has 19 tracks but MinimServer shows it as a single 36 track release.
The reasoning behind this is that for Classical releases the work can sometimes bridge multiple discs and that makes playing a single work awkward. So removing the disc boundaries solves that issue.
But I want to show the discs
But where the bridging work is not an issue, it is often preferable to show the discs. This better represents the physical release that you are already familiar with, and breaks down larger releases into more manageable sections.
Configure the Album name
Earlier we said that the Album Name must be the same for all tracks, actually MinimServer does some special parsing of the album name that means that if extra per disc information is stored at the end of the album name that MinimServer will parse it and use it to display each disc.
SongKong can add this data automatically by setting the Multi Disc Releases option to Always add Disc No to the release title
Note that the album name now has (disc 1) added.
If you rescan the files in MinimServer you can see the tracks are now grouped by disc with track numbers per disc. Also note that MinimServer parses the extra information added to the release title but does not display it (of course it would not really be able to in a sensible way since it is different for different discs).
Using the Disc Subtitle
There is another way to show a release as multi-disc albums and this is with the Disc Subtitle field. If the disc subtitle field has a value then the release is shown as multi-disc without having to make any differences to the release title field.
Some releases have an actual disc name rather than just Disc 1.. N. For these releases SongKong will automatically fill in the Disc Subtitle field such as this one which displays as multi-disc with MinimServer.
This usually makes sense since when releases have labelled their discs individually they usually can exist as standalone work. For example in this release the album Tolerance / Bop by Blue Aeroplanes is actually a compilation of two albums previously released called Tolerance & Bop.
SongKong doesn't use the Disc Subtitle field for multi-disc releases that don't have a disc title since that would not meet the metadata standards. But if you wanted to use this approach for all your releases you could manually enter data for this field with another tag editor such as Jaikoz.
SongKong 4.9 released 19th June 2017.
Reports have got a little Funkier
We have split the Summary into a Summary section and an Options section.
The Summary section now summarizes results using a bar chart, this is much simpler to understand then the previous text only method.
Matched to Release, Matched to Discogs and Matched to AMG have been improved, artwork is shown, songs are grouped by discno, and multiple groups matched to the same album are now grouped in their own group.
Transcoded versions of the same file
Its is becoming more common for customers to have multiple versions of the same album, typically a lossless hi-end version and a lossy version for the car or iPod.
We have made a number of improvements to SongKong to help with this.
File rename keeps album together
Before if you had two copies of the same album and you had SongKong configured to rename files based on metadata you could end up with a single folder containing both sets of files. Now SongKong intelligently recognizes the same album has been matched more than once and creates separate folder for each set of matching files. This happens automatically without any user configuration changes required.
Add audio format to release title
We can also easily add the audio format to the release metadata itself, this helps you to identify different versions of the same release when viewing within your player or UPnP control point.
Find Duplicates within same audio format only
We have also improved Delete Duplicates so that searches can be restricted to be within a particular format. This makes it easy to keep multiple versions of the same file but with different formats whilst still finding actual duplicates.
The full list of improvements and fixes can be found here
Part 10: Multi Disc Albums
Part 8 : Configuring the Date Index
Problem:Most of us have a mixed Classical/Non Classical music library and sometimes its nice to be able to simply browse one category or the other. The way this is usually done is by using the genre field, but then this means that all our Classical music has to be given the same genre when what we probably want to do is categorize by subgenres within Classical.
Solution:SongKong music identification album categorizes albums as non-classical/classical and helpfully writes an Is_Classical boolean field to the files themselves so we can use this to split our albums into two groups for easier browsing.
Boolean fields in MinimServer
A boolean value is simply a field that has only two values. So if we just add IS_CLASSICAL to indexTags we can then browse by two values
But MinimServer provides a nice shortcut to go straight to a value by using the fieldName:MapValue:NewName syntax
e.g
indexTags:is_classical=1:IsClassical
So now when you click on IsClassical it takes you to the classical only albums. The only trouble with the approach is that there is no no way to go to only the non-classical albums.
Browsing both values of a Boolean field
But there is a way to do this as well. It is slightly convoluted you need to add another mapping to the zero value from a pseudo field which is then populated from the original field
e.g
indexTags:is_classical=1:IsClassical,is_classical_copy=0:IsNonClassical
tagValue:is_classical_copy.default={is_classical}
Now we can browse by both IsClassical and IsNonClassical easily.
