Part 8: How do I Get Artist Consistency in my music collection
Part 7: How to add metadata to your music
Before we started digitizing music each album was a separate physical item.We found the one we wanted either because we had ordered our CDs or Vinyl ordered by the main artist or we just looked at a random set of albums until we saw one we fancied listening to.
But with digital music got much larger, and computers are not as good as humans at realizing that slight differences in artist names actually refer to the same artist.
Common problems are:
- Artists are not always attributed the same on every release:
- Minor differences in names, such as initials, spelling errors
- Artist deliberately use different name e.g Prince,
, Formerly Known As
- Different language or script, e.g. Пётр Ильич Чайковский / Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
This makes it difficult to find all music by a particular artist
Tools that lookup CD such as dbPoweramp do independently of any other CD by same artist, so no consistency and with manual edit, easy to make mistakes and introduce inconsistencies
But SongKong understands Artists as entities ( we store an Artist Id we know who they are). We use MusicBrainz Artist Entities, defacto standard used by BBC, last.fm, Google and Spotify. But our database cross references MusicBrainz and Discogs, so we can use MusicBrainz artists even when we have only matched to a Discogs release.
Each MusicBrainz Artist has a Canonical Name, instead of using name on release we can use their main name for all their releases.
If their main name is not in Roman script (eg Пётр Ильич Чайковский) we can use their Roman/English version of name instead.
Both of these options are enabled by default on the Format tab
Part 6: What databases can be used for automatic song identification
SongKong Tutorial Part 7: How to add metadata to your music
Where does the Album and Artist information, displayed in your
music player, come from? In most cases this information is stored within
the music files themselves as metadata. This is separate to the filename that may possibly contain some metadata such as Title or Track No but is not a practical way to store more then the bare minimum of information.
Different audio formats have different metadata formats, commonly known as tags. For example Flac and Ogg Vorbis files both use Vorbis Comments to store metadata whereas Mp3, Aif, Wav and Dsf all use ID3. But players and other tools such as SongKong usually try to hide these differences.
Metadata is added by SongKong once the song (and album) have been identified. The Match tab helps determine how songs are identified whereas the Format tab decides what metadata is added.
This is an important distinction, for example you may want SongKong to identify all your songs, but add no metadata to your songs apart from MusicBrainz Ids, this would be done by altering the configuration on the Format tab.
Additionally the Artwork tab defines how artwork is added, the Genre tab defines how Genres are added and the Classical tab defines additional special options for Classical music.
But we will begin with the Format tab
Part 4 - Three Things to Understand about Fix Songs Results
Part 6 - What databases can be used for Song Identifcation
SongKong Tutorial: Part 5 - Fix Songs, Review Match Options
So you have run Fix Songs in Preview mode, but maybe it is not quite how you want it. This is the time to take a look at the options and fine tune, lets discuss some of the key options you may want to modify that affect song identification.
All these options are on the Match tab
Match: All Existing folders represent a single album
SongKong generally treats folders as an album, this means it will only allow a match to an album if all songs in the folder match to the same album. But it also tries to recognise the occasional folder full of essentially random songs and treat them differently, allowing songs in such a folder to be matched to different albums or not matched at all;.
But if you know that every folder really does represent an album (or disc of a multi-disc album) then you can enable this option to force SongKong to treat all folders in this way.
Match: Preferred Release Countries
Often Albums often have different versions for different territories and countries,
but there may be no physical difference between the track listing to help SongKong decide the release to choose.
For example the Italian and German version of a particular release may have different catalogue
numbers or be released by a different record label. But this is
information is very unlikely to be in your existing metadata so SongKong
cannot use that to decide the release to pick.
But you can select a list of preferred countries that your albums are from and selecting those countries will give releases from those countries a boost making it more likely that they will be selected.
Part 3: Fix Songs - Use Preview Mode
Part 5: Fix Songs - Review Match Options
SongKong Tutorial Part 4: Three Key Things to understand about Fix Songs Results
The three most common misunderstandings about the results shown in a Fix Songs Report are as follows:
Metadata is not the Same as Filenames
SongKong fixes the metadata in your music files, by default it does not modify the actual filename so after matching your filenames may not necessarily match the metadata if previously they were badly named.
SongKong can very easily rename filenames based on metadata but it doesn't by default because this can cause problems for other applications and general confusion for the customer.
For example playlists are usually created as a list of filenames so if the name of a file changes this can break a playlist file.
Sometimes an artist changes their name (e.g Prince) so if SongKong uses a different version of the name than you were using previously this can be confusing
SongKong can easily rename files using the Rename files based on metadata in the Basic tab, but in the early stages we recommend against it.
Song Only versus Song matching
SongKong group songs firstly based on the folder structure and if that doesn't give results any existing metadata. If SongKong is unable to find an album match for all songs in a grouping then it does not match any of them to an album. This is important because the last thing you want SongKong to do is break up your albumsjust because it could identify some of the songs.
But if SongKong can correctly identify the song (as it usually can with AcoustIds) but not the album then we can add Song Only fields such as Title but do not modify fields such as Album to ensure we improve the metadata without possibly breaking up albums that SongKong simply could not find (perhaps because missing from MusicBrainz/Discogs databases) .
Genres are not changed by Default
Genres are subjective, what one person may simply describe as Rock, another may describe more specifically as Thrash Metal.
So although we can use genres and styles from Discogs we don't by default. You can easily remedy this by enabling Update Genres on the Basic tab. This will add genres but not replace existing ones.
If you want to replace existing genres then you need to make some adjustments on the Genres tab, we will discuss that later on.
Part 2: Status Report Customization
Part 4: Three key Things to Understand about Fix Songs Results
Everyone has different reasons to try SongKong, but it very likely involves Fix Songs, the automated song matching task.
Preview Mode
Without a license Fix Songs runs in Preview mode, this means you can see exactly how successful SongKong was in song identification but no files are actually modified.
After installing a license Preview Mode defaults to switched off.
Run Preview Mode on your Music Collection
If you did not run Fix Songs in Preview Mode before buying a license we highly recommend you re-enable preview and then run it now on your whole collection with the default options, or at least a sizeable section of it.
Summary
The report generated gives a very useful summary of the percentage of matches to different databases.
Matched to MusicBrainz
But it also allows you to see exactly what albums your songs have been matched to:
Song Changes
And what data has been added for songs:
Metadata Spreadsheet
Spreadsheet can be easily used to browse changes, new fields are added as Yellow, modified fields are added as Green:
It also gives the chance to find things you don't like about the changes SongKong would make. For example you may use certain metadata fields in a non-standard way and would not wish SongKong to modify these fields.
Part 1: Status Report
Part 3: Fix Songs, Use Preview Mode
Customizing Fields
By default the bar-chart only shows bars for the most common metadata. But SongKong can show a bar for any of the metadata it supports, and it supports over 130 metadata fields.
It is worthwhile reviewing the list of available fields by selecting the Update button and adding any that are you are interested in, this generally makes more sense then adding all fields.
Artwork Size Fields
The Status Report also shows a count of how many songs contain artwork, and also how many songs have artwork larger than 500 pixels. This gives a better idea of the percentage of songs that have artwork of an acceptable quality.
You may be interested in knowing how many songs have artwork at a higher (or lower) resolution then this. You can easily modify the Show artwork at least this size option to do this.
Now when you run the Status Report it will use the revised figures. If we increase the value of Show artwork at least this size to 1000 the status report shows a count of Artwork of 100%, but only 32% for Artwork with width of 1000px or greater.
Part 2: Customizing Status Report
This is the start of a SongKong tutorial aimed at new users. SongKong is deceptively powerful, in fact some customers say it is perhaps too powerful !
So it is sensible to understand how it works before diving in and setting it to work on your music collection.
Status Report
Before you start making changes with SongKong we recommend you run the Status Report task over your complete music library, the first icon on the toolbar. This does two things:
- It creates a bar-chart giving you evidence of exactly what metadata your files currently contain
- Its creates a spreadsheet showing the location of your music files and all the metadata they contain.
and it doesn't take very long to run.
Completeness Bar-Chart
The bar-chart gives a nice easy to understand view showing the percentage of your songs that have a particular metadata field, i.e on the screenshot below you can see 98% of songs have an Album field, 93% have an Artist field, but 0% have a Sort Artist field.
Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet is in the standard well supported xlsx format. So now you have a record of your music library that exists totally independently of SongKong. This can be used as an archive of your music collection at that point in time and a way to catalogue your library.
It is multi-tabbed and shows all your existing metadata
