Opening Playlists with SongKong

Today we release a new version of SongKong with a number of fixes and improvements, the most important detailed below.

Playlists

In addition to files and folders SongKong can now open M3U playlists, just drag the playlist onto SongKong and then all the files and folders within the playlist can be fixed or searched for duplicates.

You can create M3U playlists from your iTunes playlists as follows:

1. Select the desired playlist then Control-click / Right-click the playlist and select the Export... option

2. Select Save as type M3U files (.m3u8), selecting this option instead of M3U files (.m3u) ensures that songs in any language can be correctly stored on the playlist, this is particularly important for non European languages such as Arabic, Chinese or Japanese.

3. This newly created playlist file can be dragged and dropped onto SongKong.

But don't forget that although you cannot drag native iTunes playlists directly into SongKong you can drag the songs themselves directly from iTunes.

Fix Songs Cancelled 

There was an issue in the last couple of versions that could cause SongKong to finish prematurely before it had tried to match all songs, the report would say it had been cancelled even though it was not cancelled. This issue could occur when potentially duplicate files were found in a folder when matching and is now resolved in this version.

Report Creation not Finishing

SongKong fixes songs in a pipeline and is very careful not too use very much memory during this process however many songs you are fixing. However at the end of the fixing process a report is created and this does require more memory when more songs are fixed, in extreme cases this could cause SongKong to fail during report creation. Memory usage has now been substantially improved during report creation to prevent this from happening.

Other Improvements

The  full list of improvements can be found here

New Jaikoz release solves the iTunes update problem

A new release of Jaikoz is now available, the full list of changes can be found here .

Updating iTunes on OSX

This release fixes an important problem with updating iTunes from OSX on some systems.
Jaikoz uses Applescript to inform iTunes of changes, however because of an oversight later versions of the library Jaikoz uses no longer have the necessary calls to talk to the Applescript library. However if you have earlier versions of the library (as all my test machines do) then Jaikoz can talk to iTunes without problems. Until last week  I wasn't aware of the seriousness of this issue, I thought the problem was only on a few isolated installations. If previously you have have been unable to update iTunes from Jaikoz on OSX this release should solve that issue . We have also sped up the time it takes to create the internal model Jaikoz has of iTunes.
 

Changes to Release Type

Also the Release Type is now a multiple value field. Previously MusicBrainz only allowed a release to be one type, but now multiple types are supported so a release can be both an album and live or a single and a soundtrack, or even an album, a soundtrack and live.

Soundtracks 

Usually the first type indicates the length of the release such as album, single or e.p, in MusicBrainz this is known as the primary type. However because it is generally more useful to know if a release is a soundtrack then an album (which can usually be inferred because most soundtracks are albums) if a release has a secondary type of soundtrack we make this the first type added to the song.

 

Opening Playlists

There was a regression on OSX that meant that Open Playlist and Add Playlist no longer work, actually dragging and dropping a playlist continued to work so it was not noticed for a while but this is now fixed

Apostrophes

Sometimes unusual versions of apostrophes are used when release are added to MusicBrainz, usually by mistake. This causes a problem for Jaikoz when trying to capitalise titles or save files containing these characters so now Jaikoz automatically changes them to the regular apostrophe.

Code Signing

For some time the OSX version of Jaikoz has been code signed but not the Windows version, with this release we put that right. This means you can be sure that the installer you download has been created by JThink, and has not been modified by anyone else.

Opening Playlist Contents

In Jaikoz 2.8.2 I added support for opening Winamp Playlists, the most widely accepted playlist format. But I knew that what many of you really wanted is to drag and drop iTunes playlists, well you can - nearly.

The difficulties with iTune playlists are twofold. Firstly there is no playlist file so you have to communicate with iTunes instead of just reading the file. Secondly talking to iTunes is very different on Windows than on OSX , so the work effort doubles.

I now have dragging playlists from iTunes working beautifully on Windows and this will be available in Jaikoz 2.8.4 out today or tomorrow.

But OSX does not allow the playlist to be dragged to anywhere except iTunes itself (please anyone correct me if Im wrong) so it is impossible to even initiate a playlist drop. Instead I'll be creating some scripts for the iTunes Script Menu to allow you to send playlists to iTunes.