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Wednesday, 16 November 2022

SongKong 8.6 Post released 15th November 2022

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 8.6 Post

This release contains a number of major improvements to Delete Duplicates plus some important fixes

 

Preferred Deletion Criteria

We have added some new deletion criteria, Album with Most Tracks and Earliest Folder Creation Date. If you are matching based on album (any version) this would allow different versions of the same album to be marked as duplicates, and if they are differing versions and one is the Deluxe version with extra tracks it is probable you'll want to keep this one, but until now there was not a way to chose this. Now with the Album with Most Tracks criteria you can keep the album with the highest value for Track Total in your tags, this would be the Deluxe version.

Often when you have duplicate copies of the same album it is common to want to keep the first version based on the file creation date of tracks. But if you have had to do any manual organization of files then the file creation date may be later for some files in the folder. With the new  Earliest Folder Creation Date criteria it looks at the creation date of the folder, and this will be consistent for all files in a folder making it easier to keep them together.

Since these new criteria are generally very useful the default Preferred Deletion Criteria (for brand new installs) is as shown in the screenshot below.



Deletion of Empty Folders

We have a new option called When find duplicates delete folders and any sub folders if empty or only contain the following files

If this is enabled every time SongKong deletes a duplicates it checks the folder to see if it still contains any music files. If not it can consider deleting the folder and any files or subfolders if they are empty or only contain files in the configurable text field. You can edit this directly and it understands using * as a wildcard.



 

Also, when we actually delete a duplicate music file or non-music file or folder we now add to the Errors and Warnings tab to make it easier to track what SongKong has done.
 



Improvement

Bug

SongKong 8.5 Faith released 31st October 2022

We are pleased to announce SongKong 8.5


Improvements to Delete Duplicates

Before this release, Delete Duplicates would not actually delete any duplicate files until all files were loaded. This meant that if anything went wrong before that nothing would be deleted, and it also mean't that if dealing with alot of files the deletion could take some time.

We have now changed things so that files are checked for duplication as they are loaded, and if we have two files with the same duplicate key the one with the less preferred deletion criteria is immediately deleted. This means deletion still has effect even if any problem occurs during the process, this improvement is most useful when trying to run Delete Duplicates on large quantities of music files.

Previously, when a large number of duplicates were found the Delete Duplicates report could get very large because all results are stored on a single web-page, this can then mean the web-page takes a long time to load in your web-browser. We have now modified the report so it only summarizes the duplicates found by artist on the main page, and there are separate artist pages (Song is duplicate if same Song) or artist and album pages (Song is duplicate if same Song and Album) for details of the duplicates.=

Windows Security Certificate

In SongKong 8.4 we had to purchase a new Windows security certificate because the previous one had expired, however there was an issue with the build process that meant the new security certificate was not correctly applied, this has now been resolved. So Windows should no longer warn that the application is from an unknown publisher.

Issues preventing song matching being applied

A number of issues have been fixed that could cause changes to songs not to be made because an error occurred when updating certain metadata fields, these issues have now been resolved, such as this and this

Release notes - SongKong - Version 8.5

Bug

SONGKONG-2350 Preferred Deletion Criteria makes it sound like delete item which matches this criteria but other way round

SONGKONG-2348 When checking length of path segments need to check actual chars used not unicode chars

SONGKONG-2346 On MacOS always tries to start Music app even if dont have Save to Music App enabled.

SONGKONG-2343 If have folder containing audio files and sub folders with audio files then if rename audio files may try to move subfolders

SONGKONG-2342 Delete Duplicates can report completion before actually completed.

SONGKONG-2340 Check that first composer matches first artist can cause update failure if artists field is empty

SONGKONG-2339 If set Use year Only can prevent songs being updated that have release events with null year

SONGKONG-2338 If have Add Composers to Start of Album Title enabled can store null if composer has no sortname

SONGKONG-2337 MusicBrainz wikidata links not being picked up and converted for URL_WIKIPEDIA_RELEASE

SONGKONG-2310 Delete Duplicates report can get very large and hence very slow if run against a large library

SONGKONG-2305 Windows:Titlebar not showing as dark because of issue with Flatlaf Dll extraction

SONGKONG-2303 Get Windows to recognise new security certificate

Improvement

SONGKONG-2349 Delete Duplicates doesnt actually delete any files until all the files loaded and duplicates identified

SONGKONG-2320 Remote Interface, allow to go direct to edit or fix songs for particular folder

Thursday, 14 July 2022

SongKong 8.4 Gold released 14th July 2022

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 8.4 Gold


 

Artwork Improvements

This is a major release with important improvements to artwork. 

 

Added support for retrieving the Back Cover

We can now get back cover as well as front cover album images, these are stored in the music files and can also be written as a back.jpg in the album folder. 

 

 

Better Quality Artist/Band Photos

We can now get high quality artist artwork from FanArt.tv, before this release we only got artist artwork (e.g artist/composer.. ) from Wikipedia. 

 

New Artwork types can be retrieved

We have extended the types of artist artwork we retrieve, we could already get artwork for Artist, Album Artist, Composer, Conductor, Lyricist and Orchestra fields if the album was identified. But now we can also get artwork for other Performers and also the Record Label Logo ![image|549x332]

 


MinimServer Integration

This becomes really useful if you are using MinimServer uPnP server because MinimServer can define an artworkIndex folder that it be used to find matching images for index elements. So if you have defined indexes for Conductors/Composers/Performers/Record Labels ectera you can use SongKong to save images to this folder using the Other Arwork:Add all artwork to MinimServer indexArtwork folder option, then MinimServer will read the values as they will be displayed by your uPnP Control Point 

 

Independent image resizing for cover art /artist photos

We have split the Artwork tab into two tabs, and now you can independently set min/max image sizes for Cover Art and Artist Artwork, you can also decide if/how to write images to the filesystem

 



Apple Music/iTunes Fix

We also fix an issue with accessing Apple Music or iTunes, a security feature added to MacOS meant that SongKong could not get rights to communicate with Apple Music/iTunes. With this fix the first time you run SongKong your Mac will display a popup message saying > > "SongKong " wants access to control "Music".Allowing control will provide access to documents and data in "Music", and to perform actions within that app. Select **OK** to allow access. If you do not allow access SongKong will not be able to communicate with iTunes/Apple Music and therefore you should ensure that *Basic:Save changes to ITunes** is disabled 


Bug

SONGKONG-2329 Spreadsheet Basic/Artwork column should always show dimensions of Front Cover

SONGKONG-2311 Not always possible to get Artist artwork from Wikipedia if artist name contains non ascii characters

SONGKONG-2308 Replace remaining references to http://jthink.net with https://jthink.net

SONGKONG-2307 Cannot invoke "String.toLowerCase()" because "attributes" is null

SONGKONG-2306 Naimmatcher:Cannot invoke "String.equals(Object)" because "trackArtist" is null

SONGKONG-2304 On Windows incorrectly labels iTunes as MacOS Music app

Improvement

SONGKONG-2325 Allow to set max/min image size for artist artwork independently to cover art

SONGKONG-2324 Split Artwork tab into Album Artwork and Artist Artwork to give enough space for new artwork options

SONGKONG-2316 Add support for reading back cover from Cover Art Archive

SONGKONG-2314 Get Label images from fanart.tv - useful for MinimServer Label index

SONGKONG-2313 Add support for getting artwork for performers, very useful if using MinimServer Perfromer index

SONGKONG-2312 Get better quality artist/composer/conductor ... artwork from fanart.,tv

SONGKONG-1918 Update Com4j Bridge to latest version and rebuild against latest iTunes

Thursday, 14 April 2022

SongKong 8.3 Funeral released 1th April 2022

 

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 8.3 Funeral

funeral

Apple Music/iTunes

This release concentrates on improvements and fixes to the integration with Apple Music and iTunes. On MacOS this has been completely rewritten so that it work better on both Intel and M1 Macs and there are fixes for Windows with iTunes as well

Improved Matching for Multi-Disc Albums

We have improved the matching algorithm for multi-disc albums

Look and Feel

We have made some improvements to how lists and tables look so they are easier to use, and on MacOS they are more mac like.

Bug

SONGKONG-2300 Adding performers from Discogs sometimes giving java.lang.IllegalStateException

SONGKONG-2299 Match to Disc Release is scoring using contiguous trackno rather than discno/trackno so can can give bad match on disc2

SONGKONG-2298 ApplescriptEngine for Mac M1 is still the Intel version

SONGKONG-2297 MacOS:Not detecting MusicApp instead of iTunes on later versions of MacOS

SONGKONG-1917 iTunesApple Music:Create iTunes Model progress bar is sometimes showing as non-deterministic

SONGKONG-1228 iTunes:MacoS for iTunes Wav file integration not copying cover art

Improvement

SONGKONG-2301 Look and feel improvements

SONGKONG-1124 iTunes: iTunes reliability improvements

Wednesday, 30 March 2022

SongKong 8.2 Forever Released March 30th 2022

 

We are pleased to announce major release SongKong 8.2 Forever

This release has alot of improvements and fixes



FanArt Cover Art

In this release we have added FanArt.tv as a cover art source, FanArt provide high quality 1000x1000px images, if CoverArtArchive cannot provide an image of this size then we check FanArt.

We have also fixed a problem with the Cover Art Archive that preventing us retrieving images if MusicBrainz still used the http url instead of the https url.

As a result of these changes you should noticeably more and better quality album artwork with this release.

Native Mac M1 Build

We now provide a native build for the new Apple M1 cpu so you can now run SongKong on newer macs without having to use Rosetta 2, this will give much better performance.

We also fix an issue with the fingerprinter (Acoustid), this was not working properly for the M1 cpus.

Dark Mode

We now support Dark Mode on all platforms, we also use a new Look and Feel called FlatLaf on all platforms



And on MacOS the default option of Match Appearance will automatically match the Apples General:Appearance setting.

Windows Release

We have fixed the issue that caused you to have to run SongKongGui to run SongKong without the Dos window. You can now run SongKong, if you are asked to run the command window for debugging purposes you can now use SongKongDebug

Latest Java Version

All platforms have now been updated to use the latest Java version, this means various underlying Java issues are resolved and that we can make use of the latest Java features when developing SongKong.

Bug

SONGKONG-2295 Delete Reports can take a while if have many report but cursor is not changed can look like SongKong has crashed

SONGKONG-2291 Parsing filename for metadata doesnt deal properly with additional '.' characters in filename

SONGKONG-2288 Null error when nothing in FieldToDelete option

SONGKONG-2287 Not seeming to match to MusicBrainz Album only Discogs when songs have good metadata but not album folders

SONGKONG-2283 SongKong unable to get MusicBrainz coverart when original url is http and redirects to https

SONGKONG-2279 Occasional FileRename Error:Null PointerException

SONGKONG-2278 Include instrument arranger in arranger field

SONGKONG-2248 Windows:Main SongKong application should be SongKong not SongKongGui

SONGKONG-2181 Need to protect against user having all songs in a single folder and the increased memory load required

Improvement

SONGKONG-2296 Processing superlarge folder can take a long time to get going if no metadata because may submit as one group

SONGKONG-2293 Need to move Fingerprinting to fpcalc 1.5.1 to get Mac M1 chipset support

SONGKONG-2292 Change the default max size of artwork to 1200 so dont need to resize if getting large thumbnails from Caa

SONGKONG-2286 Add support for Fanart.tv Cover art

SONGKONG-2285 Add support for Dark Mode for Windows and Linux

SONGKONG-2284 Use FlatLaf LookAndFeel for all platforms

SONGKONG-2282 When add performers from Discogs they should be added alphabetically

SONGKONG-2269 Update all platforms to Java 17 LTS

SONGKONG-2158 Add MacOS M1 Build

SONGKONG-2092 Replace standard Nashorn Javascript with standalone GitHub version

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Jaikoz 11.4 Blur released March 22nd 2022

Jaikoz 11.4 Blur released March 22nd 2022

Only three improvements/fixes but all very important ones.

Acoustid Fingerprinting on MacoS
Acoustid fingerprinting is a core part of the Jaikoz matching algorithm, it allows us to identify song without any existing metadata and cross check against matches using metadata. Last year Apple released the M1 cpu and although Jaikoz can run on the M1 using Rosetta emulation the fingerprinting is provided as a independent tool and have only recently discovered this didn’t work on M1.

This is fixed with this release, if you are using Jaikoz with a new Apple computer that has the M1 chip then you need to upgrade to 11.4 for Jaikoz to work properly.

Also until this release Jaikoz on MacOS could not fingerprint WAV files, this is also now resolved.

Better Artwork with fanart.tv
In the last release we added support for cover art from fanart.tv, artwork from here is guaranteed to 1000 x 1000 pixels and to be top quality. But we only checked fanart if we coudn’t get any artwork from the Cover Art archive used by MusicBrainz, but now we will also check fananrt if there was artwork from MusicBrainz but it was smaller than 1000 pixels.

So in this release you should see significantly better artwork for many of your releases.

To guarantee this we recommend running Advanced:Empty Cache the first time you start Jaikoz 11.4

 

Improvement

JAIKOZ-1404 MACOS:Add support for Acoustid fingerprinting of Wav files

JAIKOZ-1403 If CoverArt from CAA is less than 1000 pixels in size look on FanArt for better Image

JAIKOZ-1402 Need to move Fingerprinting to fpcalc 1.5.1 to get Mac M1 chipset support

 

Jaikoz 11.3.0 Ride released March 14th 2022

 

We have a new Jaikoz release with some improvements to cover art and some bug fixes.

 


 

Cover Art Improvements 

 
In this release we have added FanArt as a cover art source, FanArt provide high quality 1000x1000px images keyed by MusicBrainz Release Group Id, this means than unlike the Cover Art Archive there is only one standard image for all versions of a release.

So we still prefer the cover art provided by Cover Art Archive keyed by the MusicBrainz Release Id as this more accurately can represent the particular version of the release you have, but we if there is no artwork we then check FanArt in preference to Discogs because the artwork is usually of a higher quality.

We have also have increased the default maximum image size from 1000 x1000 to 1200 x 1200. This is because the Cover Art Archive provides images as 1200 x 1200 thumbnails if the original image is
large enough, so then we don’t have to do the resizing ourselves, instead we can directly use the thumbnails provided by Covert Art Archive.

Bug Regressions

We have fixed an issue with the highlighters not working, and some problems with the new sorting/syncing introduced in Jaikoz 11.1.

View Artwork Full Size now automatically scales the image if there is not enough room onscreen to show the image in its native size.

Bug

JAIKOZ-1395 1 Exception when load new files with DuplicateAcoustid Highlighter enabled

JAIKOZ-1394 1 When artwork is larger than 1000 pixels the View Artwork Full Size doesnt show whole image

JAIKOZ-1392 RowSorter Exception

JAIKOZ-1390 Regression:Highlight Field Not working

Improvement

JAIKOZ-1397 1 Add support for Fanart.tv Cover art, when it has the artwork it is always of high quality, keyed by MusicBrainz ReleaseGroupId so a good fit.

JAIKOZ-1393 Change the default max size of artwork to 1200 so dont need to resize if getting large thumbnails from Caa

 

 

Tuesday, 8 March 2022

Jaikoz 11.2.0 Swans released March 8th 2022

 

Jaikoz 11.2.0 Swans released March 8th 2022

Modern Unified Look

This new Jaikoz release now has the same two modern unified look and feels for all platforms. There is a Light and a Dark look that look very similar regardless of if you are on MacOS, Windows or Linux, but all key bindings work correctly for the platform

 




Bug Fixes
We also fix a few problems found with Jaikoz 11.1.0

Bug

JAIKOZ-1378 Sorter Error on close

JAIKOZ-1376 Exception after removing custom tables when detail panel enabled

JAIKOZ-1375 SplitBars controls dont let proportions to be changed on Mac Dark mode and Linux plastic Laf

JAIKOZ-1374 Fixes for FlatLaf Dark Mode on MacOS

Improvement

JAIKOZ-1379 On MacOS allow to select Light/Dark different to MacOS appearance

JAIKOZ-1355 Use FlatLaf Look for all platforms

JAIKOZ-1354 Create Dark Mode for all platforms

 

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Jaikoz 11.1 Hole released March 3rd 2022

Pleased to announce a major release of Jaikoz 


This release has three main areas of focus: 

 Improvements to User Interface

We now support the main view/edit table being multi tabbed so now you can view many fields without having to scroll to the right, the tabs are fully configurable and you can have as few or many as you like, see here for details. 

Perhaps the most requested feature has now been done, we now support  multiple column sorting for more details 


 

SongKong Compatibility

Jaikoz and SongKong have similar matching algorithms and support the same metadata fields, but they were doing things a bit differently. Some customers use both applications and this meant that if you matched your library in SongKong and then updated them in Jaikoz some fields would get modified, then if you updated in SongKong they would get modified again, this release aims to eliminate this yo-yo ing. We also have modified the default settings of Jaikoz to better match the SongKong default profile 

Additionally we have added full support for release level performers and Discogs performers to match SongKong 

 

Bug Fixing

We have updated the jaudiotagger music tagging library, this has over twenty fixes since the last Jaikoz release, and we have fixed a number of Jaikoz bugs recently reported by customers.

Bug

JAIKOZ-1371 Synchronize row sorting between views, should attempt to sync scrolling when on same table AND tab

JAIKOZ-1368 If Classical:Copy Work to Grouping isSupport is set to MP3 and AIF should apply to all ID3 formats

JAIKOZ-1361 Jaikoz not adding Bpm unless it is within the Albunack Db Cache

JAIKOZ-1357 Low level fixes for audio format issues

JAIKOZ-1350 Fixed some issues with MusicBrainz Performers

JAIKOZ-1346 Changes tab on detail panel only the shows the first value (for multi field valueds such as instrument)

JAIKOZ-1345 Cell Editor for Instrument field only allows editing of one field

JAIKOZ-1344 Match Songs to Selected Release in Manual Tag from Musicbrainz only works if Row No then Select columns are visible

JAIKOZ-1343 Even if set to zero if MP4 has a compilation field it is shown as compilation in Jaikoz

JAIKOZ-1341 Classical:Remove Composers from Album Artist alwasy enabled even if unset

JAIKOZ-1338 If have invalid Acoustid user key Jaikoz does not report that when you try and Submit Acoustid /Mb Id Pairs

JAIKOZ-1219 MacOS Mojave:Column Sorter not working reliably

Improvement

JAIKOZ-1373 MacOS:For Dark mode move from Darcula to FlatLafDark

JAIKOZ-1367 Better match defaults to SongKong Default profile defaults

JAIKOZ-1363 For ID3 save Media as plain text instead of mapping to list

JAIKOZ-1360 IsCompilation, IsGreatestHits fields should be set to zero if not true rather than not being set at all

JAIKOZ-1358 Add autopopulation of Amazon Id (ASIN)

JAIKOZ-1349 Add support for Discogs performers

JAIKOZ-1348 Jaikoz not adding artist wikipedia or official site urls

JAIKOZ-1342 Add Hide Column option to the column header

JAIKOZ-1340 Add -d start folder option that would replace the value of startRead Folder

JAIKOZ-1275 Add support for Roon RECORDINGSTARTDATE, RECORDINGENDDATE, RECORDINGLOCATION

JAIKOZ-1234 Albunack should store release level performer credits

JAIKOZ-0612 Move fields from Audio tab in to the main View/Edit displays

JAIKOZ-0604 Add freely configurable panes/tabs/grid views

JAIKOZ-0576 Support Multi-Column Sorting

JAIKOZ-0006 Add predefined column sets to Table Preferences such as 'iTunes view'

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