SongKong 6.7 Closer - released November 26th 2019

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 6.7 Closer, this release is named after the deeply dark second album by Salford band Joy Division. 

Improvements for MacOS 

This release contains some key improvements for Apple MacOS, especially the latest version of the operating system -  Catalina.                                                                                                                   

Notarization

With Catalina Apple added an additional security mechanism called Notarization. Essentially we have to send SongKong to Apple and it does an automatic scan for malware, only if it passes can customers install without a warning. SongKong 6.7 is notarized.

Apple Music App Support 

With Catalina Apple replaced the iTunes app with the Music app, you may not even have noticed because it looks very similar, the key difference being that movies have now been moved to a different TV app. However it Music is a different application and SongKong did not support it, now on Catalina we integrate with the Music app instead of the iTunes app if customer enables it.

Dark Mode

Since MacOS Mojave you can now select a Dark Appearance rather than the default Light Appearance, and this has become increasingly more popular, this had some effect on SongKong but did not work properly.

We have now added support for Dark Appearance to SongKong. If you select this then SongKong will start in Dark Mode, otherwise SongKong will start in the usual Light Mode. (Note, if you change appearance when SongKong is already started it will not switch SongKong appearance.)

Other Improvements

Not all improvements in this release are for MacOS, we also have added:

MusicBrainz Release without Type

Sometimes SongKong matches songs to a MusicBrainz release that has no release type such as Album, E.P or even Other. If this is the case we now default to Album

Roon Artist Credits Import

If you are using Roon, running SongKong over your songs first can greatly increases the number of albums that Roon identifies. It also means that Roon will display decent metadata for those albums it still cannot identify. With the recent Roon 1.7 this includes artist credits added by SongKong such as the musicians and their instruments. But Roon cannot handle instruments that contain curly brackets () such as drums(drumset) as added by MusicBrainz. So now we replace () brackets in the instrument with [] brackets and this resolves the problem.

See here for all improvements and fixes.