Part 1: Status Report
Part 3: Fix Songs, Use Preview Mode
Customizing Fields
By default the bar-chart only shows bars for the most common metadata. But SongKong can show a bar for any of the metadata it supports, and it supports over 130 metadata fields.
It is worthwhile reviewing the list of available fields by selecting the Update button and adding any that are you are interested in, this generally makes more sense then adding all fields.
Artwork Size Fields
The Status Report also shows a count of how many songs contain artwork, and also how many songs have artwork larger than 500 pixels. This gives a better idea of the percentage of songs that have artwork of an acceptable quality.
You may be interested in knowing how many songs have artwork at a higher (or lower) resolution then this. You can easily modify the Show artwork at least this size option to do this.
Now when you run the Status Report it will use the revised figures. If we increase the value of Show artwork at least this size to 1000 the status report shows a count of Artwork of 100%, but only 32% for Artwork with width of 1000px or greater.
We are pleased to announce SongKong 5.10, mainly a bug hunting release.
Release Names
Firstly a bit of fun, starting with this release we have given each release a name. Apple used to use wild cats and now uses places in California for macOS. Google uses something sweet for each version of Android
SongKong uses the name of a favourite album, but it must be a one word album name. This restriction has prevented adding any albums by some of our favorite bands (such as Radiohead) but one word names work better for release names.
The first release name is Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, if you have never heard it, its well worth a listen.
Difficult Wav Files
ID3 Chunk
The Wav file format uses chunks for different types of file information. It uses a DATA chunk to actually store the audio, and a fmt chunk for basic meta information about the audio. It can then store metadata within an INFO chunk or a id3 chunk, or both, or none. There are many other chunks that can be added to a Wav and the chunks can be in any order.
So reading and writing changes to Wavs is complex and can go wrong. I had one such example recently the customers Wav files contained ID3 chunks storing the metadata, the content of the chunk was correct but the chunk type of ID3 was incorrect it should be in lowercase, i.e id3.
So when SongKong read the file it ignored the existing ID3 chunk and wrote a new id3 chunk. Everything appeared fine the changes could be seen viewed on their computer, except the modifications made by SongKong were not showing up in the UPnP control app.
The UPnP server was Twonky, Twonky have only recently added supported for reading id3 data from Wav files. But unfortunately they read both id3 and ID3 chunks and because the ID3 chunk came first they used that one containing the old information.
We have now improved SongKong so it recognises an ID3 chunk as a ID3 chunk, but it saves the chunk type as id3 so that the file is now correct.
Padding
We had a problem with some other Wav files. After the audio data the file had some null padding, a series of zeroed bytes and this prevented later chunks being read.
Null padding can be allowed in Wav files but it should be within a PAD chunk. In this case it was not within a chunk, but we have now improved SongKong to recognise this invalid padding and remove it from the file on save so that the file is now correct.
Bug Fixes
This release contains a number of bug fixes and improvements, all listed on the News page
Part 2: Customizing Status Report
This is the start of a SongKong tutorial aimed at new users. SongKong is deceptively powerful, in fact some customers say it is perhaps too powerful !
So it is sensible to understand how it works before diving in and setting it to work on your music collection.
Status Report
Before you start making changes with SongKong we recommend you run the Status Report task over your complete music library, the first icon on the toolbar. This does two things:
- It creates a bar-chart giving you evidence of exactly what metadata your files currently contain
- Its creates a spreadsheet showing the location of your music files and all the metadata they contain.
and it doesn't take very long to run.
Completeness Bar-Chart
The bar-chart gives a nice easy to understand view showing the percentage of your songs that have a particular metadata field, i.e on the screenshot below you can see 98% of songs have an Album field, 93% have an Artist field, but 0% have a Sort Artist field.
Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet is in the standard well supported xlsx format. So now you have a record of your music library that exists totally independently of SongKong. This can be used as an archive of your music collection at that point in time and a way to catalogue your library.
It is multi-tabbed and shows all your existing metadata
We provide ourselves at JThink on providing the very best customer service. Every suggestion is considered and every problem investigated, SongKong is being continually improved. Over the years we have implemented more systems to help with this, so thought it was time to provide an update.
Types of Problem
Support problems can be split into three broad categories
- General help on how to do something
- Suggestion for improvement or new feature
- Particular problem encountered, SongKong not working as expected or giving errors
User Forum
The first two cases are best resolved on the Jthink User Forum
we try to respond within 24 hours 7 days a week, but by posting here you often get help from other SongKong Users. The SongKong Questions sub forum is usually the best forum to use. Facebook and Twitter are not monitored as closely so are not such a good choice as the forum.
Create Support Files
If your issue is in the third category the first thing to do is run Create Support Files. This is available from main menu in Remote Mode and the Help menu in the desktop mode.
First you need to enter a summary of the problem then this will upload SongKong log files and the last five SongKong Reports to the JThink server and then notify JThink that the support files have been uploaded.
The logs files will show more details then the Errors and Warning section of the report. If your problem is how songs were matched/renamed or moved it is much easier for JThink to resolve your problem if we can see your reports.
Email
If you need to send additional screenshots then email can used, but this should only be done after sending support files
Request for Additional Information
We may ask for additional information to try and resolve the problem. If the files are small you can use email, if they are larger such as music files then we recommend you use a file hosting service such as Dropbox (free for upto 2GB of data)
Remote Login
Occasionally we may decide that remote access to your computer would be the best approach. In this case you would need to install the free Team Viewer then by Email we can agree on a suitable time to remote connect, this usually would take no longer than 30 minutes.
Existing Issues and improvements
Whilst SongKong is not an open source project we try and be as open as we possibly can. As part of this you can view all the outstanding bugs and improvements at our JIRA tracker. Green issues are improvements/new features and Red issues are bugs, you'll be pleased to know most of the issues are Green.
SongKong 5.9:Improved Song Identification and Performance
We are pleased to announce SongKong 5.9 with improved song identification and performance.
Improvement to Albunack MusicBrainz Disc Ids
In SongKong 5.7 we introduced Albunack Disc Ids, this provides a way to identify complete albums without requiring acoustic fingerprinting, both speeding up song identification and increasing the number of matches that can be found because it was able to find albums without known acoustic fingerprints or existing metadata.
We have now improved this algorithm to get more matches. Testing against a 1200 album test set with SongKong 5.7 could identify 501 albums just using Albunack Disc Ids, with SongKong 5.9 that figure goes up to 570 albums, an improvement of 13 percent. (After subsequent matching with AcoustIds and metadata we can identify 1108 albums.
Better Performance
We have made a number of further performance improvements. Many of these improvements reduce cpu usage so have most impact on slower/single cpu computers. Such computers should see a 30% increase in performance.
- SongKongs internal database has been optimized to reduce the number of calls made to the database
- Scoring algorithm has been optimized
- AcousticBrainz data can now be looked up per album instead of having to do individual lookups for each song
Support Message now can be sent with Support Files
Now when you send us your support files you can send a support message at the same time. This makes the reason for sending the support files clear and avoids you having to send a separate email message.
Help can now be hidden
In Remote mode help text was displayed on screen making it easy to see what all the options do. But this does take up screen space so we have now added the option to toggle Help on/off with the Show Help/Hide Help button
Report Creation has own Progress Bar
Previously no progress bar was shown for the Report Creation that occurs after the task has completed. However the report creation itself can take some time if you have been working with a large collection. So now Report Creation has its own progress bar that increases as the report is created making it clearer when the task is going to complete. The Report Creation progress bar uses a 1-100 percentage scale.
User Log is now more useful
The user log, songkong_user0-0.log has now been improved. Previously user log only contained errors and a summary after a task had completed. We now add a summary of song groups matched as they are matched.
10/09/2018 18.18.12:BST:SEVERE: G1164:Matched to MB/AcoustId:Ave Maria:9 of 12 to Ave Maria:cf1d4e8f-ae69-46cb-9c5c-c941951ded58 by Vyatcheslav Kagan-Paley
10/09/2018 18.18.12:BST:SEVERE: G1164:Linked to Discogs:Ave Maria:9 of 12 to Ave Maria:7135466 by Vyatcheslav Kagan-Paley
10/09/2018 18.18.13:BST:SEVERE: G8883:Matched to MB/AlbunackAcoustId:Picture This:12 of 12 to Picture This:423f245e-1c75-4948-9f48-cc4c5c8159f4 by Wet Wet Wet
10/09/2018 18.18.13:BST:SEVERE: G8883:Linked to Discogs:Picture This:12 of 12 to Picture This:6859962 by Wet Wet Wet
Each line is preceded by date, and then a Group Id of the form Gnnnn. The Group Id is simply a way for us to identify a group of songs (usually a folder). Then we have a message explaining how matched to MusicBrainz or Discogs
Whilst the user log is primarily a debugging aid for use by JThink you may find this additional information useful.
Many Bugs Fixed
We have been hunting down some of the more obscure bugs in a sustained effort to try and get bugs down to zero.In this release there are over twenty bug fixes
The full list of improvements and fixes can be found on the News Page
