SongKong 5.15 Crocodiles Released 5th March 2019

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 5:15 Crocodiles on 5th March 2019. This new release is named after the debut post punk album by Echo & The Bunnymen from 1980. Great tunes, guitar, vocals and image on one of the best debuts ever.

Compilation now means Compilation 

Originally the definition of a Compilation that was used by SongKong was the same as the one used by MusicBrainz. This means that both Various Artist Compilation albums and a Single Artist Compilation are considered to be compilations and have the Is Compilation field set. But most of us consider these two cases differently, and only really consider the Various Artist album as being a compilation.

So now only Various Artist compilations are marked as compilations, and we have added a new field called Is Greatest Hits  for a single artists Greatest Hits albums, this makes more sense.

Things are slightly different for Classical music  because it is difficult to determine the distinction we have for now continued with Is Compilation for all types of classical compilations.

File renaming for HD albums

We have added some new filename masks that will put HD albums in a separate top level folder called HD. They make use of a new addHD() javascript function, and we have also added similar addCompilation() and addGreatestHits() functions.

Improvements to Song Only Matching

SongKong always tries to match logical groupings of songs to one album, if this is not possible then it does song only matching, in such cases we only update song only fields such as Song Title and not album fields such as Track No. But often it is the case that all but one song was matched to the same album, and there is just some minor problem preventing all songs being matched. 

If subsequent Song Only Match matches the groups of songs to 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, but we only add album data when songs are missing that data we don't overwrite exsting 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.

Improved Matching

We have extended Albunack DiscId matching so that it can now work for multi disc albums as along as each disc in your collection is stored in a separate folder under the parent folder. 

We have increased the fuzziness of Discogs Albunack DiscId matching to find more potential hits. And we have fixed a bug when using Albunack DiscId matching with Mp4 files.

Plenty more fixes, please see here