We are pleased to announce the first release of Jaikoz 10, in this major release we have concentrated on improving probably the most important feature of Jaikoz - matching your music collection to MusicBrainz.
There are three key new features:
Song Only Matching
Song Only Matching ensures that Jaikoz can at least partially identify almost all your
songs even if it cannot match a group of songs to an album.
We explain Song Only Matching in detail here
Albunack Disc Id Matching
AlbunackDiscIds is an alternative to Acoustid matching that can be faster and lead to more matches for both MusicBrainz and Discogs albums.
We explain AlbunackDiscIds in more detail here
Match Directly to MusicBrainz
First of all Jaikoz looks in our dedicated Albunack server instead of directly contacting MusicBrainz. But if no match can be found we now do an additional search directly against the MusicBrainz database.
We explain Direct MusicBrainz matching in more detail here
Console Improvements
Also note the Jaikoz console now gives more information on how your songs were matched
Jaikoz, Match Directly to MusicBrainz Release
Jaikoz does not do most of it searches directly from Musicbrainz or Discogs, instead it uses Albunack. Albunack is a single database containing both MusicBrainz and Discogs datasets. It is specially designed for tagging your music and hence allow matching much quicker and much more reliably than if Jaikoz had to use MusicBrainz and Discogs directly.
Albunack is updated regularly from MusicBrainz and Discogs with the latest data, but there can be a delay of up to one month. So if you are tagging the latest releases or have added a release yourself to either of these databases it will not be in Albunack immediately.
With Jaikoz 10 we have added an extra search to MusicBrainz itself when we are unable to find a match in Albunack. This ensures you always have access to latest releases as soon as they are added to MusicBrainz.
Albunack Disc Id Matching
When you have a complete album stored in one folder with no missing or
additional tracks, and the track order can be safely determined from
either existing Track No metadata or the filename we can generate an AlbunackDiscId for your album. We can then look for a MusicBrainz match in the Albunack database,
if we find matches we double check by looking at any existing metadata
and/or generating AcoustIds for the first track.
This has three advantages over fingerprinting all songs and then finding matches based on fingerprints/acoustIds:
1. It is faster
Generating
Acoustid fingerprints is a cpu intensive task, even on a fast machine
it can take about a second per track. This might not seem much but it
can become a bottleneck, especially on a machine with slow cpus, or only
one cpu.
2. It finds more matches
Sometimes
your album may be in MusicBrainz but there are no acoustic fingerprints
linking to tracks on the MusicBrainz release. If you have no existing
metadata then we cannot find a match based on fingerprints/metadata but
we may be able to find a match based on AlbunackDiscIds !
3. It can match Discogs releases
The AlbunackDiscId is not just for MusicBrainz releases, it can also be used to match Discogs releases. This is very helpful, since we cannot directly use AcoustIds to match to Discogs.
Do I need AcoustIds for All My Songs ?
If you get an Albunack match then an acoustId fingerprint only needs to be created for one track. However there are occasions when you may want to get acoustIds for each tracks regardless.
AcoustIds are one way of finding Duplicate files so if you are using one of these options you may want to add AcoustIds for all songs.
Also the Filters menu lets you filter by variations of AcoustIds.
You can ensure AcoustIds have been added for every song before running Delete Duplicates by using the Retrieve AcoustIds Task
Previous Method
Jaikoz
always attempts to group song that belong to one album to one album. If
it cannot achieve this the the songs remain unchanged, you can override
this by disabling the Only Allow match if all songs in grouping match to one album
option.
But then this can cause a grouping of songs that do actually represent one album to be split up if the album simply does not exist in MusicBrainz yet.
Song Only Matching
Song Only Matching
works differently. If Jaikoz fails in its attempt to match a group of songs to an
album it then just attempts to match the songs via AcoustId. Having
found a match it add song details such as Title, Artist and MB Recording Id but not album details such as Track No and MB Release Id .
We can add some album information
But
its a bit cleverer then that. Firstly when an AcoustId is linked to some MusicBrainz Recordings, we look at the MB Releases that these recordings are linked to. And if the groups of songs have recordings that have links to
the same MB Release then we also add some basic release information
such as Album Name, Catalogue No and Cover Art using the most popular releases for the songs. So for each song we use the most popular release that the song is linked to.
And we know that Cover Artist a key piece of metadata customers like to have. And it is much easier to remove an incorrect piece of artwork then manually search and add artwork yourself.
We do not add MusicBrainz Release Ids
Because
we are not sure if this is the correct album we do not add any
MusicBrainz Ids that affect MusicBrainz released based tasks, so we don't add MusicBrainz ReleaseGroup Id, MusicBrainz Release Id or MusicBrainz Track Id
We do not replace existing album data
But
we only add this additional information if these fields are currently
blank for your songs, so we don't overwrite your existing data as we
cannot be sure its 100% correct.
We do not use Compilation album data
And we only add album data for albums that are not compilations.
The reasoning behind this is that we cannot be sure we have the correct
album because we cannot match all songs to the album, but if it is an
original album there is a good chance it is the correct one, or a
variation of the correct one. But if it a compilation then because popular songs can find their way onto many compilations there is a good
chance that this is actually the wrong one.
We can use User Submitted Metadata
There are many tracks in AcoustId database that we cannot find in MusicBrainz, there are currently 45 million unique recordings in Acoustid compared to 20 million in MusicBrainz.
In these cases we can at least make use of the basic user submitted metadata provided
by Acoustid. This allows us to add artist, song title and sometimes album for these songs. For album we try use metadata
from original albums that rather than compilations.
All these features of Song Only Matching should ensure that Jaikoz can at least partially identify almost all your songs without requiring modification to the default settings.
SongKong stores a cache of the songs loaded and an audit of the changes made in its own database. It also creates comprehensive reports and detailed logs. With al this details there is no denying that over time these can eat into your disk space.
On Windows they are stored within
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\SongKong
where username is your Windows user.
Recovering Disk Space
All can easily be removed and the space recovered by using the correct menu item:
Database: Empty Database
Logs :Empty Log Files
Report: Delete Reports
but what about if you want to keep them, but just store the files in a different location in the first place ?
Windows Junction Points
With Unix and MacOS this can be easily done using symbolic links but these are not available with Windows.
However Windows has Junction Points. these can be applied to make a folder link to a different location. For example here
MKLINK /J C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\SongKong E:\SongKong
I have pointed
C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Roaming\SongKong
to actually point to
E:\SongKong
e.g
Full Procedure
- Shutdown SongKong
- Create new SongKong file location (e.g E:\SongKong)
- Copy the contents of old location to new location
- Start command prompt (search for cmd) in toolbar search
- Create Junction Point (mklink /J JunctionPoint Folder)
- Restart SongKong
and that should be it.
We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 5:14 Sister on 14th January 2019. This new release is named after the album by Sonic Youth from 1987. Sonic Youth have a great sound but can sometimes be a bit self-indulgent for my liking, but this album is full of sharp angry tunes plus the classic Schizophrenia
Improved Albunack DiscId Matching
Six months ago we introduced our own additional album matching algorithm that we call AlbunackDiscIds. When you have a complete album stored in one folder with no missing or additional tracks, and the track order can be safely determined from either existing Track No metadata or filename we can generate an AlbunackDiscId for your album. We can then look for a match in the Albunack database, if we find matches we double check by looking at any existing metadata and/or generating AcoustIds for the first track.
This has two advantages over fingerprinting all songs and then finding matches based on fingerprints/acoustids:
1. It is faster
Generating Acoustid fingerprints is a cpu intensive task, even on a fast machine it can take about a second per track. This might not seem much but it can become a bottleneck, especially on a machine with slow cpus, or only one cpu.
2. It finds more matches
Sometimes your album maybe in MusicBrainz but there are no acoustic fingerprints linking to tracks on the MusicBrainz release. If you have no existing metadata then we cannot find a match based on fingerprints/metadata but we may be able to find a match based on AlbunackDiscIds.
In this release we have increased the fuzziness of the track time matching, and in testing this has increased the number of AlbunackDiscId matches by 10%, giving a reduction in the time taken to match your music and an increase in the amount of music matched.
Improved AcoustId Matching
Conversely, there are many tracks in AcoustId database that we cannot find in MusicBrainz, in these cases we can at least make use of the basic metadata provided by Acoustid. We have now improved how we use the user submitted metadata provided by AcoustId to add more metadata to your songs, and we have also made modifications so that SongKong is more likely to use metadata from original albums that compilations.
Edit Metadata
Previously Copy Row 1 could be used to copy the metadata for row 1 to the other rows in the album, but what if you only want to copy metadata for a particular field.
In The Remote Browser interface we now have Copy Row 1 button for each column to do just this, and the old Copy Row 1 button has been renamed Copy Full Row 1
With the Desktop interface, the button is availble for each column when you right-click on a column header.
Fixes
We also have a number of fixes in this release. As always, full details on the News page.
