Linking a Discogs release to a MusicBrainz Release

Linking a Discogs release to a MusicBrainz Release

In the past there have been two significant problems with trying to link Discogs releases to MusicBrainz release.

Finding a release

Firstly, it was difficult to Discogs release that can be linked to MusicBrainz but aren't already. You could browse an artist releases on Discogs but there is no indication on the Discogs site as to which ones are already linked to a MusicBrainz release. You can check whether an individual release on MusicBrainz is linked to the Discogs but you cannot filter a list of releases by whether or not they are already linked. 

And when popular artists can have hundreds of Discogs releases linked to a single master, and even moderately popular artists can often have more than thirty it is difficult to find the correct release to link to if any. Working out the best match is difficult when having to consider and compare differences and matches in metadata such as track lists, catalogue nos, barcodes, country of release and record labels.

Linking the Release

Secondly you have to actually add the link. 

Linking the release is not so difficult but when the Discogs release contains extra information that the MusicBrainz release does not have, wouldn't it be good to get that data in as well, but adding that extra data for more than a few releases at a time is time-consuming.

Linking a Discogs release to a MusicBrainz Release with Albunack

Today I am going to show you how to easily link Discogs releases to MusicBrainz releases with Albunacks artist-centric approach solves both of these problem

Finding a Release

Albunack combines data from both databases to provide comprehensive combined Artist discographies.:

• Information from MusicBrainz and Discogs is combined on a single page.
• Release group, Release and Track listings are all available on a single page.
• Existing links between MusicBrainz and Discogs are shown
• Potential matches identified by Albunack are shown. 

Linking a Release

When you click on the link button Albunack not only links the two releases but adds additional data such as barcodes and catalogue nos, you simply have to check the data and then click submit.

We have created a video to show exactly how this is done

Introductory video added to Albunack

The JThink Music Server is a dedicated server that contains MusicBrainz and Discogs data, and  is what Jaikoz and SongKong use for their automatic matching. Albunack is the public face of the music server and can be used to browse combined MusicBrainz/Discogs discographies for almost any artist.

If SongKong is not finding a match when you think it should, it is probably easier to check on Albunack instead of MusicBrainz or Discogs. Although note Albunack doesn't currently show collaborations or Various Artist releases (although they are in the JThink Music Server).

Two months ago we released Albunack and now we have now added  a Youtube channel , and this includes an introduction to Albunack



this gives a nice overview on how to navigate around an Albunack discography.

SongKong 3.15 Released

SongKong 3.15 Released

Today we release a new version of SongKong

Firstly this includes modifications required to work with cover art newly added to Discogs in the last two months, this is required due to a change in how Discogs provides their cover art data.

Then we have fixed a problem matching song title and track total when matching multi-disc Discogs releases.

We recommend you update to this latest version of SongKong and then run Fix Songs over your collection with  the For Songs Already Matched to MusicBrainz releases option set to Update Metadata and Filename Only. This will fix any data that may have been incorrectly added in earlier releases and will also updated your previously matched songs the very latest data added to MusicBrainz and Discogs.

New versions of Jaikoz and Jthink Music Server

New version of JThink Music Server 

Yesterday we released a new version of the JThink Music Server - this is what powers Jaikoz, SongKong and Albunack . This latest release fixes an issue with incorrect values for the Sort Artist field. It also add supports for the latest Discogs cover art, required because the way cover art has been provided by Discogs for releases added over the last couple of months has changed.

New version of Jaikoz Music Tagger 8.2.3

Today we release a new version of Jaikoz.

Firstly this includes modifications required to work with cover art added to Discogs in the last two months.

Then we have fixed two problems related to song titles and track total when matching multi-disc Discogs releases.

Then we have fixed a regression whereby the Only Update Year if Earlier option for the Year field was ignored so this field could be overwritten with a later date.

We recommend you update to this latest version of Jaikoz and then run Update Metadata from MusicBrainz and Update Metadata from Discogs to fix any data that may have been incorrectly added in earlier releases and to benefit from the very latest data added to MusicBrainz and Discogs.

Jaikoz 8.2.2 Available

A new release of  Jaikoz with a couple of bug fixes.

Delete Duplicate key check should be case insensitive

Delete Duplicate key check should be case insensitive to protect against tools that write identifiers with uppercase letters.

Only Allow Match if All Songs In Grouping Match to One Album should be true

Only Allow Match if All Songs In Grouping Match to One Album is defaulting to false on new install it should default to true otherwise existing songs grouped by album could be split if Jaikoz can match the songs but not all to the same album.

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