Albunack, bringing Discogs and MusicBrainz together.

MusicBrainz is the defacto standard for Music, MusicBrainz Ids are used by many of the major players in online Music services such as Google the BBC and Spotify, and the MusicBrainz schema is a thing of beauty. But it has always been difficult getting the latest releases into MusicBrainz because there are no automated feeds from record companies and it mainly relies on the hard work of the many contributors.

Discogs is another online database, its not as well designed as MusicBrainz and its codebase is not open, but it has more artists and more releases and does make its database available monthly under a public domain license. Discogs has a vibrant marketplace, but to sell a record it has to be in the database, this is a good reason for users to contribute releases, and because buyers need to know exactly what they are purchasing sellers need to enter the details accurately.

For years I have wanted to something to make it easier for editors to get data into MusicBrainz from Discogs in some form or other but never seemed to have the time, but over the last month I have been working on a solution and now I have beta available as: http://albunack.net



The idea is you look up an artist and it shows you a combined MusicBrainz + Discogs discography, showing releasegroups/release and tracks on a single page.

Here is an example for the Pale Saints, a greatly under appreciated UK band from the early 90's


This makes it easier to see gaps in the MusicBrainz which could be filled by data from Discogs, and makes it easier to add that data:

• It shows any existing links between MusicBrainz and Discogs matches. 
• It also matches up Musicbrainz releases without a Discogs link to potential Discogs releases and lists these matches together with a Link button to seed a MusicBrainz Edit release. 
• It provides an Import button to seed a MusicBrainz Add Release from other Discogs releases not linked to Musicbrainz  

I have been testing it myself over the last few weeks and it is so much quicker and so much safer  then previous ways I have used of adding data. Ive also found it is very good at showing when there is incorrect data in either MusicBrainz or Discogs.

You can also use it to check automated tagging done by SongKong or Jaikoz since they use the same underlying database.

Currently it only shows releases where the artist is the only album artist credit (i.e we don't list collaborations, nor Various Artist releases) Of course, the user still has to make decisions about the data and check the data before submitting anything to MusicBrainz, and everything still goes through the edit system. You can use the bug tracker for raising any issues.

Matching improvements with SongKong 3.14

A new release of SongKong 3.14 with a handful of bug fixes and improvements.

Unable to load large folder containing songs directly within it

If customers have all their files in one folder and that folder is on the network then SongKong can timeout before loading all files.

A few months ago the  Database Unreturned Connection Timeout option was set to 30 minutes to protect against against hibernate connection being deadlocked and therefore unable to return, it was part of a two prong defence against processes getting stuck. The other was adding a limit of 30 minutes for processing of any grouping- the original implementation of this was a little buggy but is now working correctly so we are safe to remove the  Database Unreturned Connection Timeout and this fixes the issue.

Release Date comparison is incorrect

When deciding between similar MusicBrainz releases we take the release date into account, and score earlier release dates higher. At one point the server only stored a single release date (and country) for a release but can now store multiple release date/country combinations (known as Release Events) but the client code was not updated to use release events, now fixed.

If fingerprint is AQAAAA dont check it

If Acoustid generates the above fingerprint for a song it means it could not actually generate a valid fingerprint so we should not try and lookup and Acoustid Id for it.

Discogs matching threshold checks should be higher

We have to be stricter when matching Discogs releases than MusicBrainz because we can not use AcoustId as a crosscheck, so the matching threshold has been increased.

If matching takes more than 24 hours time taken in summary just shows remainder
Both report and logs dont show correct timezone

Both these issues are to do with the displays of dates, I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with the new Java 8 Date/Time api to fix this.

Better song matching with SongKong 3.13

A new release of SongKong is now available that  fixes these two issues.

Firstly it fixes a regression introduced in 3.11

When reusing existing Discogs Releases as candidates SongKong was not checking trackcount properly. The check to see if the there are more tracks than the number of songs to match which is not allowed if you have Only allow match if all tracks on album were matched is incorrect. We tried to fix this in SongKong 3.12 but made a mistake but it is now fixed.

If MetadataMatcher fails if it needlessly does Match Recording Only again

If song matching by metadata  fails to find a match it needlessy does Match Recording Only, and there is no point because this would have already been done during the Match by Folder stage, worse than that metadata matching can be called a number of times for the same group of songs. So wasted processing that can cause timeouts if extending the length of matching for a grouping over the timelimit and use additional amounts of memory.

 

Regressions fixed in Jaikoz 8.2.1

Unfortunately there was a regression introduced into Jaikoz 8.1.1 and another regression found its way into the Jaikoz 8.2.0  release last week, both of these problems are resolved in Jaikoz 8.2.1

Preferences not preserved

The effect of the first regression was that any changes you made to your preferences may not be preserved upon update. If you updated from any of these combinations

• 8.1 to 8.1.1
• 8.1.1 to 8.2 
• 8.1 to 8.2 

you need to do additional steps to recover your preferences, if you updated from an earlier version such as 8.0 there is not an issue.

Firstly see if you an old version of your preferences file, named as settings.old as follows.

OSX
From Finder, hold down Option Button and select Go menu
Select Library from the list
settings.old found in Preferences : Jaikoz

Windows
settings.old found in C:\Users\username\Jaikoz

Linux
settings.old found in $HOME/.jaikoz/Prefs


If you do have the file

• Close Jaikoz
• Delete settings.jai
• Rename settings.old to settings.jai
• Install Jaikoz 8.2.1

If you updated twice from 8.1 to 8.1.1 and from 8.1.1 to 8.2.0 then settings.old probably doesn't have your preferences.

In this case the solution is to either check your backups for an earlier version then put that back and install Jaikoz 8.2.1 or to manually apply your preferences again.
 
http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-978

Error  when trying to match a folder of random songs

The second regression could result in an error occurring when trying to match a folder of random songs

http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-977

this is fixed in this new release.

Bpm Detection with Jaikoz Pro

Knowing the  Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song can be very useful

• If you are a runner, matching the BPM (also known as tempo) to your running pace can help improve your performance.
• Professional DJ's need to be able to blend the end of one song into the next, without the transition being awkward or jerky. By figuring out the Bpm  you'll  know if you need to bring the tempo up or down to have them both playing at the same speed, this is known as beatmixing
• Creating a  playlist to fit a certain mood is considerably easier if you use songs with a similar Bpm, such as creating a playlist of songs with a slow tempo for a relaxing playlist.
  

Calculating the Bpm of a song can be done manually or using tools that let you tap the beat to some song and then write the BPM value into iTunes. But calculating the BPM for more than a handful of songs this way is not something you want to do, you need software to accurately calculate the BPM for you.

Bpm Detection with Jaikoz Pro

Jaikoz (Pro Version)  can now get the BPM for over a million songs as they are matched to MusicBrainz, and because the BPM has already been calculated for these songs it takes no extra time to add the BPM - in contrast to other solutions.

BPM is the first of many new acoustic attributes planned for Jaikoz Pro

As your songs are matched to MusicBrainz the BPM is added to your files together with all the other metadata already added by Jaikoz.

Jaikoz is Fast

With other BPM solutions the software has to listen to each song to calculate the BPM, this is slow and CPU intensive. But Jaikoz Pro does not have to calculate the BPM itself for over 1 million songs because that work has already been done for you by AcousticBrainz, instead it can just look up the BPM for the MusicBrainz Recording that the song has been matched to.

And because we have added all the BPM data directly to the Jthink Music Server Jaikoz has to make no extra additional Api calls to get this data, so adding BPM to your files takes no extra time.

The database is growing every day.

And Accurate and Accessible

BPM is stored by AcousticBrainz to three decimal points,

BPM is added to your files using the standard BPM field for your  audio format (mp3, mp4, flac ectera) so is accessible to most Music Players, additionally we also store the decimal value as well in the FBPM field.

Jaikoz 8.2.0 With Bpm Detection, better Artwork and better Matching

Jaikoz 8.2.0 is released today

Bpm Detection

Jaikoz (Pro Version)  is one of the first applications to support the new AcousticBrainz acoustic information database. This acoustic information describes the acoustic characteristics of music and includes  information such as bpm, moods, keys and scales.

As your songs are matched to MusicBrainz the BPM is added to your files together with all the other metadata already added by Jaikoz.With other BPM solutions the software has to listen to each song to calculate the BPM, this is slow and CPU intensive. But Jaikoz does not have to calculate the BPM itself for over 1 million songs because that work has already been done for you, instead it can just lookup the BPM for the MusicBrainz Recording that the song has been matched to. And because the BPM data has been added directly to the Jthink Music Server Jaikoz has to make no extra additional api calls to get this data, so adding BPM to your files takes no extra time.

Better Artwork 

Discogs has a concept of primary artwork and secondary artwork, primary artwork contains the front cover art and secondary artwork was used for other images such as the back cover or sleeve inserts. It used to be that an editor could specify whether an image was primary or secondary. But now when editing the first image is always considered the primary image and all other images are secondary images, this order can be modified by dragging and dropping the images in Discogs to make a different image the primary image.

However the Discogs data dumps contain many releases that only contain secondary images and no primary images. The precise reason for this is still unclear but whereas Jaikoz previously ignored secondary images meaning no Discogs images was found for these releases this new version now makes use of the secondary image if a release contains no primary image but does contain secondary images.

Better matching

If you have iTunes configured to make a copy of all songs added to it (the default) then any songs with no metadata are added to the Unknown Artist/Unknown Album folder. Jaikoz now realizes that this folder does not represent an actual album and therefore should be treated as one.

There also some other improvements to the matching algorithm

Rating now copied to Tunes

Unlike other metadata like artistname/albumname iTunes stores rating within its database which is why they don't get picked up by default.

So now if you have iTunes AutoUpdate enabled
1. If you modify the rating field within Jaikoz then that rating will be copied into iTunes database
2. If you don't modify the rating but your file has a rating the rating is not copied into iTunes because since the file was originally added to iTunes you may have changed the rating in iTunes and you would not want the iTunes rating to be overwritten with the original rating.
3. But if the file is not currently in iTunes then the rating is copied to iTunes regardless of whether it has been modified.
4. If you use ForceSave then once again the rating will be copied to iTunes even if not modified.

Jaikoz not starting if language preferences set to Turkish

Usually bugs found in Jaikoz are of my own making, but not always. A bug in Java on OSX causes it to crash if the locale is set to Turkish and attempt is made to try and call an external program. Unfortunately that is just what we do when we start Jaikoz to check the fingerprinting program is installed, now fixed and thank you to Mehmet for bringing this problem to my attention.

The full list of fixes can be found here

More improvements with SongKong Music Tagger 3.12

The new release can be downloaded here

Regressions fixed

In 3.11 we made a change so that if your songs already had a MusicBrainz or Discogs Id we considered that release as a release candidate  even if it wasn't found as a potential match in the normal way. But we didn't get this quite right, the problem was that if you have Only allow match if all tracks on album were matched enabled then SongKong should reject any release that has more tracks that the song grouping you are trying to match to it. But a release found by existing id was circumventing this check. Now fixed by:

SONGKONG-837
SONGKONG-838

SongKong always writing genres as number if in Standard genre list

 Mp3s make use of a standard genre list and if your genre is in the list SongKong actually stores the associated number rather than the text, for example it would store 17 instead of Rock (if your genre is not in the list it stores the text). However some applications such as iTunes don't understand the numbers properly if  Save:Save songs so they work best with iTunes is enabled SongKong should always writes genres as text even if they are in the known list. This was not working but it now

SONGKONG-836

SongKong not loading some Mp3s with bad metadata

We have also improved how SongKong loads mp3s so it can cope with songs with corrupted metadata.

SONGKONG-839

SongKong should only add Bpm for songs that do not have it

In the last release we added support for adding the Bpm for songs (Pro version only) but now modified it so that it only adds Bpm if the song does not already have a Bpm.

SONGKONG-842


Full list of fixes in the Issue Tracker 

Now you can easily add the Bpm to your songs as well

Knowing the  Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song can be very useful

• If you are a runner, matching the BPM (also known as tempo) to your running pace can help improve your performance.
• Professional DJ's need to be able to blend the end of one song into the next, without the transition being awkward or jerky. By figuring out the Bpm  you'll  know if you need to bring the tempo up or down to have them both playing at the same speed, this is known as beatmixing
• Creating a  playlist to fit a certain mood is considerably easier if you use songs with a similar Bpm.

but calculating the BPM is not something you can do yourself you need software to accurately calculate the BPM.

Bpm Identification with SongKong Pro

SongKong Pro is released today. SongKong Pro is one of the first applications to support the new AcousticBrainz acoustic information database. This acoustic information describes the acoustic characteristics of music and includes  information such as bpm, moods, keys and scales,

As your songs are matched to MusicBrainz the BPM is added to your files together with all the other metadata already added by SongKong.

Song Kong is Fast

With other BPM solutions the software has to listen to each song to calculate the BPM, this is slow and CPU intensive. But SongKong does not have to calculate the BPM itself for over 1 million songs because that work has already been done for you, instead it can just lookup the BPM for the MusicBrainz Recording that the song has been matched to.

And because the BPM data has been added directly to the Jthink Music Server SongKong has to make no extra additional api calls to get this data, so adding BPM to your files takes no extra time.

The database is growing every day.

And Accurate and Accessible

BPM is stored by AcousticBrainz to three decimal points,

BPM is added to your files using the standard BPM field for your  audio format (mp3, mp4, flac ectera) so is accessible to most Music Players, additionally we also store the decimal value as well in the Floating BPM field.

Improved Song Matching with SongKong 3.11

Hot on the heels of SongKong 3.10 we have a new release of our automated music tagger. A customer was trying to work out why their songs would not be matched to an album with SongKong and I decided that the resultant improvements that came from investigating the problem  were really worth getting out there. But I'll try really hard to wait at least a week before the next release !

Improve Recognition of Multi-Folder Albums

If you have Only Allow match if All Songs Matched and Only Allow Match if all tracks on album matched the problem is that although SongKong considers the two sub folders as being part of one release it does an additional check based on name to confirm this, and that check is  case-sensitive so SongKong found cd but doesn't match CD so it decides that each sub-folder represents a separate album then it tries to match each folder in turn and of course cannot find an album that can be completely matched by just one of the folders. 

Always consider existing MusicBrainz Release Id when rematching

When rematching SongKong ignored existing MusicBrainz Ids and matched purely based on the AcoustIds and user metadata. However we should always consider an existing MusicBrainz Release Id when rematching. This protects against SongKong not finding good matches when it should do and also provides better parity with Jaikoz. The existing MusicbrainzReleaseId will only be used if it is the best scoring match of the release candidates.

Always consider existing Discogs Release url when rematching

 And the same logic applies for Discogs matches as well.

Always do AcoustId match when metadata match was for a Various Artist release

Assume you have a 2 CD Various Artist release with both discs in subfolders and you have Only Match if all Songs in Grouping Match enabled but Only allow match if all tracks in album were matched is disabled.

Now if initially SongKong fails to group the two folders as one grouping it will do a metadata search and because that includes a search on artist:Various Artist plus a fuzzy search on title plus track count. the Track count will be wrong for our release because track count is based on one cd only. Because the search is for a Various Artist and fuzzy release the search probably will find a number of releases matching this an the invalid track count. If we find lots of potential matches then an AcoustId match would not be done (for performance reasons) so we end up not finding and scoring against the correct release and hence no match.

Now if  Only allow match if all tracks in album were matched is disabled.and we did a Various Artist search we always ensure we do an AcoustId match regardless of how many metadata matches we got.

The full list of improvements can be found here

SongKong 3.10 Bug Fix release

This release fixes a number of bugs, fixes one regression and adds one improvement:

OSX:SongKong has encountered an error trying to build model of iTunes library

If SongKong is configured to update iTunes then SongKong has to create a model of the iTunes library on start up so that it knows what songs are already under iTunes control. On OSX SongKong has to use Applescript to communicate with iTunes, and the iTunes library is large it can take a while to rebuild it, but the default timeout used by Applescript is not always large enough for large iTunes library. The timeout has been increased in this release.
 

OSX:Not always showing all options on first tab on small screen

On my own Mac with 17" monitor with native resolution at 1920 x1200 resolution I had never seen this error  but reducing the display to 1280 x 800 and the first tab of the Fix Songs dialog no longer has room to show all the options. This kind of resolution could be used by smaller laptops such as a 13" screen version, and unfortunately SongKong gives no visual indication that there are any other options. The problem persisted on Windows as well, but a Windows is able to fit in more on a smaller resolution than OSX.

The problem is now fixed, a vertical scrollbar is displayed as neccessary.

Treat track names like 'Track 1' as blank

SongKong uses existing metadata to match songs and to validate acoustid matches, but sometimes existing metadata should not be used. The most common culprit is track names of the form Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 ectera , whilst these can be valid track names they normally are not so now if existing metadata contains such names we just treat as if the song currently has no title.

Regression:Discogs matching Thread prematurely ending

This regression was introduced in SongKong  3.9 by the change to match multi-folders groupings to Discogs after a failed MusicBrainz match before attempting matching sub folders. Unfortunately this change could cause Discogs matching to stop prematurely, it is now fixed in this new release. 

Full list of fixes and improvements can be found here

How to install the Minecraft OreSpawn mod on Windows

Installing mods with Forge

Now I know this has nothing to do with SongKong or Jaikoz but I'm hoping this saves someone a bit of time and avoid them pulling their hair out.

Minecraft and OreSpawn

My kids love Minecraft and they have been bugging me recently to install a mod (not something I had done before), in particular the AuraSpawn mod , well I promised I would but the instructions made it seem rather more complex than it actually was.

Turns out they actually meant OreSpawn , this is actually quite a fun mod with loads of new animals and monsters including various dinosaurs and Godzilla. And to install this mod and various other mods you also need to install a mod loader called Forge. Neither OreSpawn or Forge currently work with the latest version of Minecraft but when you run as Forge it automatically runs the correct version of Minecraft for you.

Installing Forge on Windows 8

• Use a browser that doesn't mess with .exe files such as Firefox (Internet Explorer renames them)
• Select this link to select the latest version of Forge (currently works with Minecraft 1.7.10), you have to wait a five seconds for Adfly to finish, then click Skip Ad in the top right hand corner to download the installer
• Double-click on the installer to start it, ensure Install Client is enabled and click OK
• Now start Minecraft Launcher,  and the Profile dropdown should now list Forge, select this profile
• Select Play starts Minecraft as the correct version and you'll notice a new option called Mods
• Exit Minecraft 

Installing OreSpawn on Windows 8

• Now download OreSpawn itself, you can go to the OreSpawn website or just download the 1.7 version from here, once again you'll have to wait 5 seconds before skipping the Ad.
• Open the Downloads folder in Windows Explorer
• Open another instance of Windows Explorer and enter %appdata% into the address bar double click on the .minecraft and then the mods folder within it.
• Drag and drop the orespawn zip file from the first  instance of  Windows Explorer into the mods folder of the second
• Restart Minecraft Launcher, click on Play and then click on the Mods option to check it now contains the OreSpawn mod,
• Now create a new world and you'll have a host of new spawn eggs, try spawning a Criminal to see a little political joke.

Its worth noting that once you have Forge installed you can easily install other Forge compatible mods as well.

Improved Discogs Artwork Coverage with SongKong 3.9

Better Discogs Artwork Coverage

 Discogs has a concept of primary artwork and secondary artwork, primary artwork contains the front cover art and secondary artwork was used for other images such as the back cover or sleeve inserts. It used to be that an editor could specify whether an image was primary or secondary. But now when editing the first image is always considered the primary image and all other images are secondary images, this order can be modified by dragging and dropping the images in Discogs to make a different image the primary image.

However the Discogs data dumps contain many releases that only contain secondary images and no primary images. The precise reason for this is still unclear but whereas SongKong previously ignored secondary images meaning no Discogs images was found for these releases SongKong 3.9 now makes use of the secondary image if a release contains no primary image but does contain secondary images.

For you this means even better image coverage

Improved Matching

We deal with some more difficult matching problems in this release the key ones being:

For multi disc releases grouped one folder per disc SongKong could incorrectly match just one of the folders to a MusicBrainz release and not the others if MusicBrainz only contained a single disc version, even if  the complete release was available in Discogs. Now when matching multi-folder groupings if it fails to match the folders to MusicBrainz SongKong attempts Discogs match before breaking into subfolders and matching each folder to MusicBrainz only if no Discogs match is found.

If you have iTunes configured to make a copy of all songs added to it (the default) then any songs with no metadata are added to the Unknown Artist/Unknown Album folder. SongKong now realizes that this folder does not represent an actual album and therefore should be treated as one.

A silly assumption crept in somewhere that if all songs are by different artists then it must be a Various Artists compilation but this is often not true such as in this album - and this prevented SongKong matching albums when it should have. 

 

Various Fixes

 We also have a host of bug fixes across  various parts of SongKong, full details at the Issue Tracker

Jaikoz 8.1.1 with Artist Sort Names fixes and new Windows Installer

Today we release Jaikoz 8.1.1 , this fixes an important regression that caused Jaikoz to no longer add the correct  Artist Sort and Album Artist Sort values for your songs, instead it was just using the Artist and Album Artist values.

We also fixed another issue with sort names, a release such as Ravenous is credited to both Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman , yet previously Jaikoz would only use the sort name of Damon Albarn as the value of Artist Sort, now it considers both names giving a sort name of Albarn, Damon & Nyman, Michael instead of just Albarn, Damon.

Jaikoz tries to weed out duplicate songs when matching a folder of songs to an album, but it was incorrectly identifying songs with the same name but actually different track lengths as the same song - when they are actually different songs, such as the two versions of L.O.V.E on this release.

For Windows users Jaikoz now comes as a self-extracting zip, just like we did in the latest version of SongKong . This means just double-clicking on the installer will do a complete install. But because Internet Explorer has an annoying habit of renaming .exe files we keep the standard zip version of the installer as well, much easier to move to a better browser such as Firefox though.

Full list of fixes at the Issue Tracker

Lot of improvements in SongKong Music Tagger 3.8

Today we release SongKong 3.8

Installer

We have improvements to the Windows installer, its now a self-extracting archive

Stability

If your database was corrupted you could try and recreate it by using Empty Database but this did not always work and you had to manually recreate the database folder,  this is now handled by SongKong.

Matching Improvements

There are some bug fixes and  improvements to matching itself. SongKong was not always doing its Acoustid double-check to ensure that songs had not been matched to a song with a title that didn't match the songs Acoustid, this is fixed.

SongKong had an issue when matching fields with a quote in it, this could prevent potential albums being returned, now fixed.

SongKong tries to weed out duplicate songs when matching a folder of songs to an album, but it was incorrectly identifying songs with the same name but actually different track lengths as different songs, such as the two versions of L.O.V.E on this release.

Improved Match Song only to both match more songs, and to be careful when matching songs when you already have a song with a different title.

We also fixed a bug that when renaming files from multidisc releases from a folder per disc to one folder per complete album we were left with folders  that should have been deleted.

Report Improvements

The Fix Songs report now comes with extra instructions on how to navigate it, and errors are now timestamped


The full list of fixes in this release can be seen here

Creating a Self-Extracting Installer On WIndows

With SongKong 3.8 at last we have a self extracting and installing installation for Windows. But what does this mean, and how do you do create one ?

Self Extracting Archive

A self-extracting archive (sfx) requires no extraction application to be installed on the users computer because the extractor code is in the archive itself. So not only does the user not have to actively unzip the archive but you do not have the problem of not having suitable software to unzip the archive. This does mean that you will get a different user experience depending on what application was used to create the self-extracting archive in the first place.

Self Installation

A simple sfx can extract itself with a double-click, but then the extracted files still need to be installed by double-clicking the setup file, so its a two stage process. However some sfx solutions allow the archive to be installed to a temporary space and then an exe started automatically to perform  the installation.

Creating an Sfx for SongKong

I looked at both 7-Zip and WinRar, I found the instructions for 7-Zip unclear and the resultant archive looked a bit amateurish, but with WinRar I found it surprisingly easy as follows:

• Install WinRar
• Select SongKong installer files, right click and select Add to Archive
• Use Browse.. to create the archive in the folder above
• Change Archive Format to Zip
• Enable Create Archive Format
• Select Advanced tab
• Select SFX Options
• Select Setup tab
• Enter setup.exe into the Run after Extraction field (this is the name of the program I want to run)
• Select Modes tab
• Enable Unpack to temporary folder
• Select text and Icon tab
• Enter 'Unpacking SongKong Installer'
• Select OK
• Select OK
• Sign the songkong-windows.exe to prevent Windows complaining when you download and install.

Now having it working via the GUI I would prefer to automate this in the script, but that is a job for another day.

Jaikoz 8.1 Bug Fix Release

Today we release Jaikoz 8.1, this is very much a bug fix release.

Remaining regressions from the Jaikoz 8 release have now been fixed  

Manual Correct From MusicBrainz was not showing metadata matches, only acoustid matches - this is now resolved.

Match to Specified Release was no longer letting you override warnings about track durations and acoustid title matching. This has been fixed and extended to allow override when matching by Catalogue No or barcode as well.

Correct Metadata from MusicBrainz could fail if you had music files directly in your root folder (i.e / on OSX or C:\ in Windows), now fixed.

NullPointerException at Match to Specified MusicBrainz release if release has release date but not release country now fixed.

Further Performance and stability improvements

Jaikoz using more memory as songs are fixed, this regression was introduced in Jaikoz 8.0.2 as aprt of another fix.

Performance improvements have been for dealing with matching large releases.

The full list of fixes can be found here

Draconian new EU Vat Changes

Not a technical post but please take the time to read this, its important.

VAT Overview 

Until the end of 2014 VAT (Value Added tax) is added to most purchases within Europe when you buy something. Currently this is about 20% but the rate varies between country and there is no VAT at all some items but the VAT rate is always set at the rate of the companies country. VAT make products more expensive and adds an administrative/accounting overhead to companies, but most EU countries set a threshold so that if your EU Sales are less then the threshold you do not need to charge VAT. This allows micro-businesses to compete with larger businesses who have many benefits of economies of scale not afforded to smaller businesses.  

JThinks position

JThink is very much a microbusiness - for over seven years I have been designing, developing, marketing and selling my software. I don't make a fortune but I make enough to support myself. In the UK the VAT threshold is currently £81,000 so as long as my EU sales are less than that I do not need to be VAT registered.

Luxembourg is the problem 

Unfortunately Luxembourg and companies such as Amazon  have been abusing VAT for a number of years. Luxembourg set their VAT rate to only 3%  for products such as books and e-books and then companies such as Amazon registered their EU operations in Luxembourg so they could charge VAT at only 3% undercutting their competitors. Despite the low VAT rate Luxembourg receives a surge of tax that it would not have got otherwise.

New Draconian legislation introduced by the EU

So how does the EU sort this out, does it punish Luxembourg directly, no it introduces new draconian VAT rules starting January 1st 2015 that make no sense and punish small businesses. As a further kick in the teeth for the next few years the additional VAT raised will be given to Luxembourg to compensate them for their loss . Coincidentally the current president of the EU is Jean-Claude Junker , from 1995 to 2013 he was the Prime Minister of Luxembourg.


This is better explained by the HMRC than the EU but I shall attempts to sum it up in a few sentences

1. New rules mainly effect e-services such as e-books and software
2. VAT is now based on the customers countries not the companies country.
3. The VAT threshold is removed for any sales outside a companies country

New rules effect e-services such as e-books and software

If you look at the documentation and examples the focus is very much on telecommunications and ebooks, after all the main driver of this leglisation was originally the Amazon issue. However software has been quietly added the mix so this affects Jaikoz and SongKong

 VAT is now based on the customers countries not the companies country.

This means that depending on where the customer is based the VAT rate will be different. Countries such as Italy have recently slashed the VAT rate on ebooks so that their citizens are not greatly impacted by the change but so far there have been no such reductions for software.

It also means that companies have to record additional information about the customers location, thankfully today the deadline for implementing this additional information has been extended from January 1st 2015 to June 30th 2015 so I don't yet have to make major changes to my order processing system, but I may have to if Paypal doesn't get onto this. However I do have to charge VAT starting from January 1st , so nothing has changed there.

 The VAT threshold is removed for any sales outside a companies country

This is real killer for companies such as myself, if I sell one copy of my software to a cusotmer based in Denmark then I have to charge VAT.  Perversely it is now less expensive to supply software to customers outside of the EU then within because not VAT is charged. So as EU citizens expect the prices of many items to rise. The one area where the HMRC has backtracked is that I now may maintain my threshold for UK sales, so UK customers do not need to pay VAT.

How does this affect Jaikoz and SongKong ?

Unfortunately I cannot afford to absorb this cost myself, nor take different revenues based on where the customers resides so I have had to pass on the VAT costs, as it is I have not increased my price for a number of years. This is a tax that goes directly to the EU and make things more difficult for micro businesses so the tax will  now be added at purchase time.

Can I avoid paying this Tax ?

If you are a VAT registered business then you can always claim back any VAT charged.

This tax is only payable to those of you based in the EU but not the UK. If you are based anywhere in the rest of the world such as US, Australia or Japan there is no change.

One idea is that if you have a generous friend who resides in one of these countries maybe they could purchase the software and give it to you.

If like me you think this is step in the wrong direction you can find out more about it at http://euvataction.org/ this includes a petition that can be signed here

 

Matching Classical Releases

Matching Classical albums gives us some challenges that we don't usually have with Pop/Rock albums.

Very Long Song Titles

Classical releases can often have long titles because according to the MusicBrainz Classical Guidelines if they are part of a work they should contain the Work title in each song title, for example here. And Operas should contain each act or scene as in here. This means when matching existing song titles it takes longer because there are more words to match, it is also harder to match because these guidelines don't reflect as accurately what is written on the cover as for non-classical releases.

Very Large Releases

Because many classical composers catalogues are out of copyright it is inexpensive for music publishers to release large box sets  of a composers output. One such example is the 100 CD Complete Works Beethoven release. Its actually too large to show reliably in MusicBrainz so instead I show the results of a search .Trying to match songs to large releases is invariably more time consuming than smaller releases because there are so many permutations to consider, actually expotentially more.

Solutions

Both of the problems are addressed in SongKong 3.7 together with some more improvements, full details here

Jaikoz 8.0.2 Released

Jaikoz 8.0.2 Released

A few more regressions were found in the Jaikoz 8.0.0 released, hopefully all now fixed.

Probably the most important issue was that Featured Artists were not getting added to the artist field when songs were matched from MusicBrainz.

Also if field was deleted (so had status red) and that song was matched to MusicBrainz none of the fields that were deleted would be repopulated until the song was actually saved.

Full list of fixes can be found here

What do you really, really, really want to see in the next version of Jaikoz ?

With Jaikoz 8 released we finally have both SongKong and Jaikoz using the JThink Music Server for their metadata queries. The Jthink Music Server was a huge chunk of work that we hadn't planned for at the start of the 2014 (it was driven by changes over at Discogs) but the speed and accuracy improvements that come with it have been pretty amazing. SongKong is now maturing  with very few bugs remaining in it so we now have time to plan for 2015.

So what do you really, really, really want to see in the  next version of Jaikoz ?

We have our own list of top priorities that you can see here but its difficult to gauge what my customers want, so please post a comment here if there is something you want or need that Jaikoz doesn't provide.

Improvements to Deleting Duplicates with SongKong 3.5

SongKong 3.5 released today, in previous releases the main focus has been on improving the Fix Songs task but in this release we wanted to review other part of the application application, especially Delete Duplicates Songs

Delete Duplicate Songs

First of all we found some bugs in Delete Duplicates that have now been fixed.

The help for Delete Duplicates has been completely rewritten to give more detail and make more sense for non-MusicBrainzers and additional checks and balances have been added to make Delete Duplicates work better in Trial mode.

The we added a new option to Song is a duplicate if has same called Same song (metadata only). This is very similar to Same MusicBrainz song only for finding duplicate songs without being concerned about albums, but without the need to match the songs to MusicBrainz first (although we would always recommend using the MusicBrainz based options whenever possible)

Help

Help has been edited, including simplification of the terminology such as using Album instead of Release and Song instead of Recording. We have added a Pdf version accessible from the Help menu for some bedtime reading, but seriously the Pdf version works well if you want a paper copy of the SongKong manual.

Fix Songs

But despite what I say at the start of this post we have made some improvements to FixSongs as well, these include some major performance improvements based on improvements we made in Jaikoz 8.

Full list of improvements and fixes can be seen here

Jaikoz 8.0.1 Released Today

Jaikoz 8.0.1 Released Today

This is very much a bug fix release, included in the bug fixes are fixes of three important regressions.

1. Manual Correct from MusicBrainz would not display properly if  an of the potential matches were songs linked to a release without a release date or country.
2. Matching to MusicBrainz was broken for Linux installations due to a bug in the Linux installer.
3. Update Metadata from MusicBrainz would not work for songs matched before Jaikoz 7 because they would not contain a MusicBrainz Track Id field only a MusicBrainz Recoriding Id field. Now we have fixed Jaikoz to check for a Recording Id if a Track Id does not exist.

You can see the full list of fixes here

Jaikoz 8 Arrives: Complete Music Management Solution

Jaikoz 8

Today we release Jaikoz 8 this is an exciting release because it is the first time Jaikoz uses the JThink Music Server for both Discogs and MusicBrainz matching.

This means

• Faster Matching
• More Accurate Matching 
• More Reliable Service

Faster matching because the  JThink Music Server is optimized for release matching - and is optimized  to show the data Jaikoz requires, not more and not less, this results in a minimum amount of api calls. In contrast the MusicBrainz server has to support all many different scenarios and customers and understandably has to make compromises

More Accurate Matching search has been optimized to best match the algorithm used by Jaikoz, and additional data such as finding the original release of a release is returned with the match.

More Reliable Service MusicBrainz service is available to many applications and because of this usage can vary wildly, and at times can become unresponsive.  Because the Jthink Music Server is only used by Jaikoz and SongKong demands on the server are less, and unlike the MusicBrainz server the Jthink Music Server can automatically scale to multiple machines when demand does peak.

Some New Features

We have also added

• Match Songs to one MusicBrainz Album by Catalog No
• Match Songs to one Discogs Album by Barcode
• Match Songs to one Discogs Album by Catalog No

and you can now

• View this Song at AcousticBrainz

AcousticBrainz is a new site that does audio analysis on songs in the MusicBrainz database to work out attributes such as the Bpm or Danceability of a song. There will be deeper support for this in the next version of Jaikoz. You can help the AcousticBrainz project yourself by submitting your own songs for analysis.

 Many More Improvements

In this release the matching algorithm of Jaikoz has had a Spring clean, it has taken on most of the improvements implemented by SongKong plus added some new ones to give the fastest and most accurate matching so far.

We taken a look at any issues raised in the last year and fixed as many as we possibly could.


You can see all the 42 fixes and improvements made in this release here

How to easily calculate the Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song

Knowing the  Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song can be very useful

• If you are a runner matching the BPM to your running pace can help improve your performance.
• Professional DJ's need to be able to blend the end of one song into the next, without the transition being awkward or jerky. By figuring out the BPM  you'll  know if you need to bring the tempo up or down to have them both playing at the same speed.
• Creating a  playlist to fit a certain mood is considerably easier if you use songs with a similar BPM

But how do you actually calculate it ?

There is now a really easy way to do this thanks to a new project called  AcousticBrainz 
a collaboration between MusicBrainz and Music Technology Group, University of Barcelona

• First your songs needs to have MusicBrainz Recording Ids, as you know this is easiest to do by running them through SongKong Tagger 
• Then download an AcousticBrainz client from here
• Install and run the client and point it to your music collection, this will calculate the BPM for each song and then submit it anonymously to AcousticBrainz
• Then to look up the BPM just look up the page http://acousticbrainz.org/mbid in your web browser i.e. http://acousticbrainz.org/5f3a763a-669d-4a4c-bafa-d76fc5ae885d
• You'll notice it doesn't just provide the BPM but all kind of cool things such as key, danceability and mood , but more about these in another post.

The future

This is a brand new project so it is not integrated into any other tools yet but soon SongKong and Jaikoz will allow you to both submit new AcousticBrainz data and to automatically add it to your songs.

Matching Multiple Albums using only Acoustids

The SongKong 3.4 release is full of improvements to the matching process.

SongKong now does a much better job of handling multiple albums without metadata in one single folder. Previously if you had Only allow match if all tracks in album were matched enabled it had difficulty matching multiple albums contained within a single folder unless they had some existing metadata. The workaround was to disable the option but this then allowed SongKong to match partial albums, possibly not the desired outcome. Now in this release SongKong can derive metadata from the songs Acoustids and group and match the songs accordingly without having to disable the above option.

Overall SongKong is better at matching albums, before this release it would try and match a grouping completely to one album, if that failed and depending on user preferences it would then match each song one by one. Now before resorting to song by song matching it trys matches partial groups to a release. This means results are split over less albums, and it speeds up the matching process because it is quicker to match a group  of songs to a release in one go rather than song by song.

There are some super larger releases in  MusicBrainz and Discogs, these are usually Box Sets of the complete works of established artists. Matching songs to these larger releases can be time consuming and give the impression that SongKong has stopped working. A number of improvements have been made to prevent SongKong spending too much processing a group of songs, and a Still Alive progress bar has been added to show that SongKong is still working 

Full details of all issues fixed in this release can be found here .

New Version of SongKong with Better Matching

Today on 3rd November 2014 we release SongKong 3.3, this release is full of improvements to the matching process:

SongKong now does a much better job of matching songs to multi-disc releases such as box sets, previously if checking against very large releases such as this 50 Cd Elvis Presley Box Set SongKong could take a long time, now the matching is quick and accurate.

Match Song to Recording only is now more effective at identifying the correct song when an acoustid matches to multiple recordings because it takes existing metadata into account.

Discogs matching is more effective because SongKong can now find matching albums based on the existing song titles in your files, before potential albums were only found based on existing artist and album name metadata.

We have also improved the identifying of duplicates when matching songs by taking into account acoustids and song title metadata at the same time. By identifying duplicates files we can better match the non-duplicates files to the correct album.
Full details of all issues fixed in this release can be found here .

Why does SongKong not match this song to the right song ?

Why does SongKong not match this song to the right song ?

SongKong is a release based tagger, this means that first of all it  always tries to match songs to a complete release  rather than an individual song to an individual track on a release. Release based tagging is much more sophisticated then track based matching.

But if you only have the odd song instead of complete releases such as albums and E.P' this is not possible.  So unless Only allow match if all songs in folder match to one album and Only allow match if all songs in album were matched are both enabled SongKong then attempts to match the remaining songs one at a time.

The primary way of doing this is matching by the Acoustid but sometimes a single Acoustid can match multiple recordings, so we use additional metadata to help decide on the best recording. But this doesn't always help so in SongKong 3.2 we have added two new options.

 

Ignore existing metadata when matching individual songs

If you know the metadata is incorrect you can enable this option so that only acoustids are considered then SongKong will use the recording that has been matched to that acoustid by the most people, this is usually the correct choice.

Ignore metadata derived from filename when matching individual songs

If the song has no song title SongKong tries to derive the song title from the filename but if you know the filename does not represent the song title it can be ignored by enabling this option.