Three Key Things to understand about Fix Songs Results

Part 3: Fix Songs - Use Preview Mode
Part 5: Fix Songs - Review Match Options

SongKong Tutorial Part 4: Three Key Things to understand about Fix Songs Results

The three most common misunderstandings about the results shown in a Fix Songs Report are as follows:

Metadata is not the Same as Filenames

SongKong fixes the metadata in your music files, by default it does not modify the actual filename so after matching your filenames may not necessarily match the metadata if previously they were badly named.

SongKong can very easily rename filenames based on metadata but it doesn't by default because this can cause problems for other applications and general confusion for the customer.

For example playlists are usually created as a list of filenames so if the name of a file changes this can break a playlist file.

Sometimes an artist changes their name (e.g Prince)  so if SongKong uses a different version of the name than you were using previously this can be confusing

SongKong can easily rename files using the Rename files based on metadata in the Basic tab, but in the early stages we recommend against it.

 

Song Only versus Song matching

SongKong group songs firstly based on the folder structure and if that doesn't give results any existing metadata. If SongKong is unable to find an album match for all songs in a grouping then it does not match any of them to an album. This is important because the last thing you want SongKong to do is break up your albumsjust because it could identify some of the songs.

But if SongKong can correctly identify the song (as it usually can with AcoustIds) but not the album then we can add Song Only fields such as Title but do not modify fields such as Album to ensure we improve the metadata without possibly breaking up albums that SongKong simply could not find (perhaps because missing from MusicBrainz/Discogs databases) .
    

Genres are not changed by Default

Genres are subjective, what one person may simply describe as Rock, another may describe more specifically as Thrash Metal. 

So although we can use genres and styles from Discogs we don't by default. You can easily remedy this by enabling Update Genres on the Basic tab. This will add genres but not replace existing ones.

If you want to replace existing genres then you need to make some adjustments on the Genres tab, we will discuss that later on.