SongKong 5.13 Gattaca release.

 

SongKong 5.13 Gattaca released on November ^20th 2018

This new release is named after the soundtrack from the sc-fi film Gattaca. Fantastic thought provoking film and the soundtrack by prolific classical composer Michael Nyman capture the narrative perfectly. Nyman has also done much work with film director Peter Greenaway, so many great pieces of music.

Use Windows Compatible Name

This releases fixes an issue with the Use Windows Compatible Name option introduced in the previous release. The main issue was that is was preventing the subfolder structure being created properly on non windows systems when Rename Filename for Metadata was enabled

Renaming of MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION

MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION was used whenever a MusicBrainz recording was linked directly to a work. So this was not really a work in the conventional classical music sense of the work, for classical it would generally link to a movement (this would then have a Part Of relationship to an actual work ). For Pop/Rock it did link to the work for that recording, but we do not usually want to store such works in the WORK field because that confuses tools and players that always expect works to encompass movements.

So this field was simply a way of storing the MusicBrainz Work directly linked to a MusicBrainz recording. The
MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION was confusing and open to interpretation  so we have now renamed to MUSICBRAINZ_RECORDING_WORK, and
MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION_ID has been renamed to MUSICBRAINZ_RECORDING_WORK_ID. This effects all audio formats supported by SongKong.

Renamed some internal field mappings

This is unlikely to effect many of you but we have renamed some of the internal tag mapping fields so they are better named and have better compatability with other applications.

For ID3 format (used by Mp3, Wav, Aif, Dsf) we have renamed the TXXX:Script field to be TXXX:SCRIPT.

For WMA format we have renamed ComposerSort to ComposerSortOrder




 

SongKong at Hi-Fi show WIndsor this weekend

SongKong at Hi-Fi show Windsor, UK this weekend

We shall be doing  a series of workshops about managing digitial metadata and demonstrating SongKong with our friends at Melco.

Please come and say hello.

 

 

 

 

How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection

Part 8: How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection

Part 7: How to add metadata to your music

Before we started digitizing music each album was a separate physical item.We found the one we wanted either because we had ordered our CDs or Vinyl ordered by the main artist or we just looked at a random set of albums until we saw one we fancied listening to.
 
But with digital music got much larger, and computers are not as good as humans at realizing that slight differences in artist names actually refer to the same artist. 

Common problems are:
 

• Artists are not always attributed the same on every release:
• Minor differences in names, such as initials, spelling errors
• Artist deliberately use different name e.g Prince, , Formerly Known As
• Different language or script, e.g. Пётр Ильич Чайковский / Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

This makes it difficult to find all music by a particular artist

Tools that lookup CD such as dbPoweramp do independently of any other CD by same artist, so no consistency and with manual edit, easy to make mistakes and introduce inconsistencies 

But SongKong understands Artists as entities ( we store an Artist Id we know who they are). We use MusicBrainz Artist Entities, defacto standard used by BBC, last.fm, Google and Spotify. But our database cross references MusicBrainz and Discogs, so we can use MusicBrainz artists even when we have only matched to a Discogs release.
 
Each MusicBrainz Artist  has a Canonical Name, instead of using name on release we can use their main name for all their releases.

If their main name is not in Roman script (eg Пётр Ильич Чайковский) we can use their Roman/English version of name instead.

Both of these options are enabled by default on the Format tab 

 

SongKong 5.12 Dandelions, Compatibility release.

SongKong 5.12 Dandelions released on November 2^nd 2019

The new release is named after an album by King of the Slums. Vicious violin playing against downbeat lyrical stories make it truly like nothing else, one of Manchesters unsung heroes. You can give it a listen here on Spotify

Use Windows compatible characters in filenames

This happens anyway when running SongKong on Windows but with the increase in customers using SongKong with linux based NAS servers  a potential problem became apparent. Linux allows ':' in the filename but Windows does not, so if you create such a filename on linux but then remotely view the files in Windows Explorer a pseudo filename is generated instead that bears no relation to the actual filename. The colon character is commonly used in the album title of classical albums to separate the composer from the performers so it is a particular issue with classical music.

So we have added a new option that ensures any filenames created will be visible in Windows, any characters that are not allowed will be replaced with an hyphen character.

This option is not available on Windows installs since any names created on Windows will be Windows compatible anyway.

Melco Installations

Previous versions were missing a way to halt SongKong, and a way to prevent SongKong automatically starting when your Melco started. Solutions provided for both of these now, please see the Melco Install Page for details.

Get back to Progress page if Browser reopened

A few customers have encountered this issue when running in Remote Mode. Now this has been resolved as follows, if you reopen the browser and try to start another task it will now display an error message and take you to the progress page of the currently running task.

Better Memory Usage

The most memory hungry part of SongKong is actually the report generation at the end of the task. So if you are fixing alot of songs on a low memory device there could be an issue with the report creation, this has now been rewritten so that it does not require significant memory.

There was also an issue in Remote Mode that if there was a memory issue SongKong would just shutdown  immediately instead of handling  the memory issue, cancelling the task and creation a report . This has now been resolved.

Full details of all improvements and fixes can be found here