SongKong MusicTagger 5:14 Sister, Improved Matching and Metadata Release

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 5:14 Sister on 14th January 2019. This new release is named after the album by Sonic Youth from 1987. Sonic Youth have a great sound but can sometimes be a bit self-indulgent for my liking, but this album is full of sharp angry tunes plus the classic Schizophrenia

 

Improved Albunack DiscId Matching

Six months ago we introduced our own additional album matching algorithm that we call AlbunackDiscIds. When you have a complete album stored in one folder with no missing or additional tracks, and the track order can be safely determined from either existing Track No metadata or filename we can generate an AlbunackDiscId for your album. We can then look for a match in the Albunack database, if we find matches we double check by looking at any existing metadata and/or generating AcoustIds for the first track.

This has two advantages over fingerprinting all songs and then finding matches based on fingerprints/acoustids:

1. It is faster

Generating Acoustid fingerprints is a cpu intensive task, even on a fast machine it can take about a second per track. This might not seem much but it can become a bottleneck, especially on a machine with slow cpus, or only one cpu.

2. It finds more matches

Sometimes your album maybe in MusicBrainz but there are no acoustic fingerprints linking to tracks on the MusicBrainz release. If you have no existing metadata then we cannot find a match based on fingerprints/metadata but we may be able to find a match based on AlbunackDiscIds.

In this release we have increased the fuzziness of the track time matching, and in testing this has increased the number of AlbunackDiscId matches by 10%, giving a reduction in the time taken to match your music and an increase in the amount of music matched.

Improved AcoustId Matching

Conversely, there are many tracks in AcoustId database that we cannot find in MusicBrainz, in these cases we can at least make use of the basic metadata provided by Acoustid. We have now improved how we use the user submitted metadata provided by AcoustId to add more metadata to your songs, and we have also made modifications so that SongKong is more likely to use metadata from original albums that compilations.

Edit Metadata

Previously Copy Row 1 could be used to copy the metadata for row 1 to the other rows in the album, but what if you only want to copy metadata for a particular field.

In The Remote Browser interface we now have Copy Row 1 button for each column to do just this, and the old Copy Row 1 button has been renamed Copy Full Row 1

With the Desktop interface, the button is availble for each column when you right-click on a column header.

Fixes

We also have a number of fixes in this release. As always, full details on the News page.

 

Jaikoz 9.4.1:Bug Fix Release

Today we release a fix for Jaikoz 9.4.0 a fix for the following issue:

 [JAIKOZ-1208] - Rename mask incorrectly display COMMENT language and description 

Was found to cause a problem with file and folder renaming. File and folder renaming would only work if you had a value in the comment field.

This has now been fixed in Jaikoz 9.4.1 

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Jaikoz 9.4.0 Release

It has been a while, but we are pleased to announce a new Jaikoz release today!

New Artwork Options

Music players can be very picky about how their artwork is delivered so we have added some new options to allow you to deal with this.

In the Local Correct:Artwork tab we have added two new options.

Preferred Image Format

By default Jaikoz will save the artwork in its its original format. But by checking JPEG it is forced to convert into JPEG, or by checking PNG it is converted to PNG. 

If both options are checked  than original image files that are either JPEG or PNG are not converted. Other formats will be converted to JPEG, and PNG only used if there was a problem converting to JPEG.

Compress artwork if size is larger than this

Remember that JPEG is a lossy format that is compressed. By making the image more lossy it can be compressed to smaller and smaller sizes but with a loss of quality. The default setting of 100,000 Kb is likely to have no effect as this sets the image size to a maximum of 100Mb, but you can reduce this as required.

Tagging Compability

We have fixed over twenty issues that affect how metadata is read and written to your music files. These improvements will make Jaikoz work better with non-standard audio files, and ensure these files are more compatible with other applications. 

Other Fixes

We also have a number of other fixes for Jaikoz, full details on the News page

SongKong 5.13 Gattaca release.

 

SongKong 5.13 Gattaca released on November ^20th 2018

This new release is named after the soundtrack from the sc-fi film Gattaca. Fantastic thought provoking film and the soundtrack by prolific classical composer Michael Nyman capture the narrative perfectly. Nyman has also done much work with film director Peter Greenaway, so many great pieces of music.

Use Windows Compatible Name

This releases fixes an issue with the Use Windows Compatible Name option introduced in the previous release. The main issue was that is was preventing the subfolder structure being created properly on non windows systems when Rename Filename for Metadata was enabled

Renaming of MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION

MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION was used whenever a MusicBrainz recording was linked directly to a work. So this was not really a work in the conventional classical music sense of the work, for classical it would generally link to a movement (this would then have a Part Of relationship to an actual work ). For Pop/Rock it did link to the work for that recording, but we do not usually want to store such works in the WORK field because that confuses tools and players that always expect works to encompass movements.

So this field was simply a way of storing the MusicBrainz Work directly linked to a MusicBrainz recording. The
MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION was confusing and open to interpretation  so we have now renamed to MUSICBRAINZ_RECORDING_WORK, and
MUSICBRAINZ_WORK_COMPOSITION_ID has been renamed to MUSICBRAINZ_RECORDING_WORK_ID. This effects all audio formats supported by SongKong.

Renamed some internal field mappings

This is unlikely to effect many of you but we have renamed some of the internal tag mapping fields so they are better named and have better compatability with other applications.

For ID3 format (used by Mp3, Wav, Aif, Dsf) we have renamed the TXXX:Script field to be TXXX:SCRIPT.

For WMA format we have renamed ComposerSort to ComposerSortOrder




 

SongKong 5.12 Dandelions, Compatibility release.

SongKong 5.12 Dandelions released on November 2^nd 2019

The new release is named after an album by King of the Slums. Vicious violin playing against downbeat lyrical stories make it truly like nothing else, one of Manchesters unsung heroes. You can give it a listen here on Spotify

Use Windows compatible characters in filenames

This happens anyway when running SongKong on Windows but with the increase in customers using SongKong with linux based NAS servers  a potential problem became apparent. Linux allows ':' in the filename but Windows does not, so if you create such a filename on linux but then remotely view the files in Windows Explorer a pseudo filename is generated instead that bears no relation to the actual filename. The colon character is commonly used in the album title of classical albums to separate the composer from the performers so it is a particular issue with classical music.

So we have added a new option that ensures any filenames created will be visible in Windows, any characters that are not allowed will be replaced with an hyphen character.

This option is not available on Windows installs since any names created on Windows will be Windows compatible anyway.

Melco Installations

Previous versions were missing a way to halt SongKong, and a way to prevent SongKong automatically starting when your Melco started. Solutions provided for both of these now, please see the Melco Install Page for details.

Get back to Progress page if Browser reopened

A few customers have encountered this issue when running in Remote Mode. Now this has been resolved as follows, if you reopen the browser and try to start another task it will now display an error message and take you to the progress page of the currently running task.

Better Memory Usage

The most memory hungry part of SongKong is actually the report generation at the end of the task. So if you are fixing alot of songs on a low memory device there could be an issue with the report creation, this has now been rewritten so that it does not require significant memory.

There was also an issue in Remote Mode that if there was a memory issue SongKong would just shutdown  immediately instead of handling  the memory issue, cancelling the task and creation a report . This has now been resolved.

Full details of all improvements and fixes can be found here

SongKong 5.10:Loveless, Bug Hunting Release

We are pleased to announce SongKong 5.10, mainly a bug hunting release. 

Release Names

Firstly a bit of fun, starting with this release we have given each release a name. Apple used to use wild cats and now uses places in California for macOS. Google uses something sweet for each version of Android 

SongKong uses the name of a favourite album, but it must be a one word album name. This restriction has prevented adding any albums by some of our favorite bands (such as Radiohead) but one word names work better for release names.

The first release name is Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, if you have never heard it, its well worth a listen.

 Difficult Wav Files

 

 ID3 Chunk

 The Wav file format uses chunks for different types of file information. It uses a DATA chunk to actually store the audio, and a fmt chunk for basic meta information about the audio. It can then store metadata within an INFO chunk or a id3 chunk, or both, or none. There are many other chunks that can be added to a Wav and the chunks can be in any order.

So reading and writing changes to Wavs is complex and can go wrong. I had one such example recently the customers Wav files contained ID3 chunks storing the metadata, the content of the chunk was correct but the chunk type of ID3 was incorrect it should be in lowercase, i.e id3.

So when  SongKong read the file it ignored the existing ID3 chunk and wrote a new id3 chunk. Everything appeared fine the changes could be seen viewed on their computer, except the modifications made by SongKong were not showing up in the UPnP control app. 

The UPnP server was Twonky, Twonky have only recently added supported for reading id3 data from Wav files. But unfortunately they read both id3 and ID3 chunks and because the ID3 chunk came first they used that one containing the old information.

We have now improved SongKong so it recognises an ID3 chunk as a ID3 chunk, but it saves the chunk type as id3 so that the file is now correct.

Padding

We had a problem with some other Wav files. After the audio data the file had some null padding, a series of zeroed bytes and this prevented later chunks being read. 

Null padding can be allowed in Wav files but it should be within a PAD chunk. In this case it was not within a chunk, but we have now improved SongKong to recognise this invalid padding and remove it from the file on save so that the file is now correct.

Bug Fixes

This release contains a number of bug fixes and improvements, all listed on the News page 

SongKong 4.0 now released with Classical support

We are pleased to announce that a major new version of SongKong is available today

The main focus of this release is support for Classical Music tagging. Classical Music has never been as well supported in taggers, players or indeed any aspect of recording music as Popular Music but with this version of SongKong we aim to address that.

We will discuss Classical in more detail in other post but there are some key improvements that we list here:

• SongKong now identifies when a song is classical music 
• When identified instead of just using the composer as the track artist by default it now adds the performers, orchestra and conductor, but you can configure to keep on using composer if you wish.
• Works, movements, part, part numbers and part types are now added in their own fields
• Orchestra and Opus now have their own fields
• SingleDiscTrackNo now stores the trackno as if it is ona single disc release
• Performers are added with their instruments, with additional fields to indicate if they are credited soloists or not.

We also make some general matching improvements.

The reports now let you play your songs from within the report to make it easier to check results. This works for all formats that html supports (mp3, wav, ogg, mp4)

We also provide a linux version that can be installed when you only have a command line and no gui (also known as a headless server). SongKong has always had the ability to be run from the command line but previously the installer itself needed a Gui.

Jaikoz 8.4.2 Released

Today we release Jaikoz 8.4.2, this is a small release with a few bug fixes and minor improvements as listed below, what you'll notice is better matching in certain circumstances.

There is also an improvement that allows saving to an OGG format file which has a ID3v1Tag at the end of the file. ID3v1 is used by the MP3 format and should not be added to OGG files, but certain tools are doing so anyway, Jaikoz can now handle such files.

• [JAIKOZ-1100] - Album derived from folder is persisting even when single song was not eventually matched
• [JAIKOZ-1105] - Multiple Songs Not being Matched - One song at a time will match
• [JAIKOZ-1097] - queryByMetadata function fails if no artist could be derived from metadata
• [JAIKOZ-1099] - Songs in iTunes UnknownArtist/Album folder can be treated as a single release potentially causing timeout
• [JAIKOZ-1108] - Unable to save changes to .ogg file which has illegal ID3v1 tag at end

Now work begins on adding automatic mood identification as we have already done in SongKongPro

Better track matching when submitting new releases to Musicbrainz

For some time Jaikoz has allowed you to submit new releases to Musicbrainz, the selected songs in Jaikoz are used to open the MusicBrainz Release Editor with all the details filled in, so that you just need to check the details and then submit the form.

But in MusicBrainz recordings can be linked to multiple releases so Jaikoz tries to identify when a recording already exists instead of creating a new recording. Doing this makes Musicbrainz more useful so that in an ideal world every recording listed in MusicBrainz is actually a unique recording, and we can see all the releases that the recording is based on.

Jaikoz did this by comparing track titles and durations but sometimes recordings were incorrectly linked when in fact they were different versions of same song.

A more accurate solution

Now with Jaikoz 5.5.0 we have replaced this by matching using Acoustids, only Musicbrainz recordings with the same acoustId as your track are potential candidates, and only then do we do further checks on title and duration to ensure a good match.