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

• SONGKONG-2335: Delete Duplicates give more option to allow deletion of folders that no longer contain music folders
• SONGKONG-2355: Delete Criteria, add Preferred Deletion Criteria to keep longest album
• SONGKONG-2357: Modify default Preferred Deletion Criteria order
• SONGKONG-2361: Add Earliest/Latest Folder Creation Date as Preferred Audio Criteria for Delete Duplicate

Bug

• SONGKONG-2351: When you swap appearance from light to dark \(or vice versa\) cannot read menu bar items until restart
• SONGKONG-2354: Delete Duplicates:java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException
• SONGKONG-2356: After cancelling Fix Songs report load files still continues after report has been created.
• SONGKONG-2358: Undo Changes not working when select original location for moved files
• SONGKONG-2359: Problem loading files with null values for DiscNo or Disc Total
• SONGKONG-2360: For Delete Duplicates the Highest BitRate option should only apply to lossy formats such as Mp3 or Ogg

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