SongKong 1.8 with new performance status bar and improved Virtual Machine performance

Whilst SongKong works quicker when using a MusicBrainz virtual machine I confess it was not working quite as quick as I hoped, and I didn't know where the problem lay so I added some performance statistics to the new SongKong taskbar in SongKong 1.8.

MusicBrainz Delay

The MusicBrainz Delay records the additional delays added to SongKong to prevent more than one query per second being sent to MusicBrainz inline with its terms of service. When using a virtual machine the delay should have been zero, but this was not the case. This uncovered an issue that rate limiting was only disabled when doing MusicBrainz lookups, but not for searches, fixing this problem boosted performance

MusicBrainz / AcoustId / Discogs Queue

SongKong uses a number of online databases for matching songs, not just MusicBrainz. All these databases have terms and conditions that restrict usage to one query per second so if SongKong is ready to send queries more quickly than that we have to queue the tasks. This status bar shows the queue for MusicBrainz, AcoustID and Discogs databases and is updated every thirty seconds. The most important queue is the MusicBrainz queue and this can be eliminated completely by using the local MusicBrainz server.

Memory Usage

When SongKong is started the maximum memory it can ever use is specified, this is the second value displayed and SongKong can never use more memory than this regardless of how much memory your computer actually has. Whereas the first value is how much of that memory SongKong is actually using. Note that SongKong uses a garbage collector to release memory that is no longer required and this is called periodically, if SongKong is nowhere near max memory usage it tries to recover memory less often than it could, and so the current memory usage may be higher than SongKong is actually using.

On Windows you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing SongKong.ini (32-bit) and SongKong64.ini (64-bit)

On OSX you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing /Applications/SongKong.app/Info.plist

On Linux you can modify the maximum memory allocated by editing songkong.sh

Other Fixes in SongKong 1.8

If you had the Update Genres option enabled it could cause Fix Songs to cancel prematurely, this is noe resolved.

If you removed all countries from Preferred Countries so that it was an empty list this will prevent Fix Songs from running

Faster SongKong matching with the new Musicbrainz VM

To speed up matching it is possible to configure your own local MusicBrainz servers instead of using the official MusicBrainz servers and use this with SongKong. This avoids the requirement to only send one query per second to the MusicBrainz server so speeds up the matching that can be achieved by SongKong,

Additionally this resolves an issue when trying to use multiple copies of SongKong at the same time in the same home network. Usually with a home network external services such as MusicBrainz see all your computers via the same ipaddress, and therefore the rate limiter is applied to all computers as if they were one computer, this effectively prevents you using multiple copies of SongKong on a home network in parallel. But if the server being used does not impose rate limiting then there is no longer a problem.

But the problem has always been the difficulty of setting up a MusicBrainz server in the first place !

Now at long last MusicBrainz have now released a new Musicbrainz VM containing both Musicbrainz Server AND Search Server I've been trying it out and it works great !

The latest official MusicBrainz instructions are available from here. but in this blog we document the instructions so that they are more relevant to using the Virtual Machine with SongKong as follows. Warning some of the steps can take a few hours to run but the procedure is very simple.

1. Ensure you have a BitTorrent client such as Vuze installed, this is required to download the Virtual Machine, and is a much more reliable way to download large files.
2. Download the 9GB MuscbrainzVM via your BitTorrent client
3. Windows/Linux user can download and install from VmPlayer this is free and more reliable then VirtualBox
4. Mac users can use Vm Fusion, although unfortunately this is not free, or try the less reliable VirtualBox
5. The remainder of these instructions assume you are using VMPlayer, but the steps for VMFusion and VirtualBox are much the same.
6. Start VMplayer and choose Import Virtual Machine from the File menu. Select the downloaded file.
7. Select Options and increase Virtual Memory to at least 2GB if your machine is powerful enough
8. Select Play Virtual Machine
9. Log in on the console using the username vm and password musicbrainz
10. Update the database with the latest data added since the VM was created using bin/replicate now this may take a while depending on how old the VM is.
11. Build search indexes, this will take a few hours bin/reindex
12. Get the IP address of your virtual machine.using command:ifconfig | grep eth0 -A 1
13. You can check it is working in browser by pointing to port 5000 of the ipaddress found previously e.g. http://10.1.1.104:5000
14. Configure SongKong, set Server:MusicBrainzServer and Server:MusicBrainz Search Server to the same address e.g. http://10.1.1.104:5000
15. Now SongKong will use the local MusicBrainz server rather than the offical MusicBrainz server. This should be faster and more reliable.