SongKong Music Tagger Released

[ijabz]

Hi, I'm the software developer behind http://jthink.net/songkong an automated music tagger available for Macs.

SongKong is a music organization and tagger application designed to simplify the task of managing your digital music collection. If you have ever used Tuneup Media or Rinse My Music you could consider SongKong as an alternative.

The major differences are that:

SongKong does not run within iTunes, however it can still keep your iTunes database in sync.
SongKong uses MusicBrainz and Discogs instead of Gracenote database
SongKong creates very detailed reports showing exactly what is had modified, example here
SongKong keep all changes in a database so you can revert any changes you don't like at a later date.
SongKong includes fixing metadata, fixing artwork and deleting duplicates within a single application with one lifetime license.
SongKong can be used on folders, files, playlists or your whole collection
SongKong can be used to monitor a folder and automatically fix new music as it is added to this folder.
SongKong is created by one person, we have open discussion forums, and an an open bug tracker as well as email support, see here

The free trial can be used as many songs as you like for as long as you like and it will create a report showing exactly what has been matched and what could be modified but it doesn't actually save the changes unless you have a full license.

 

[ijabz]

SongKong 1.22 Released on 5th April 2014

This new release has a number of major improvements and fixes including

Match song to recording only
Only allow match if all songs in album were matched option
Undo Changes can now select the original location of files to revert option

Full details available from http://blog.jthink.net/2014/04/songkong-122-with-new-matching.html

 

[ijabz]

SongKong Music Tagger 2.0 Released

This major release contains a number of significant improvements, a trial can be downloaded from http://jthink.net/songkong/downloads/songkong-osx.dmg?val=34

Self hosted Discogs Server
Pleased to say that SongKong 2.0 is now available. There are a host of improvements in this release but the most significant is that Discogs requests are now served by our own server rather than Discogs itself. The great thing about this is we can customize the search to work exactly how we require it for SongKong rather than working within the constraints of the Discogs provided search, this means we can get better search results and dramatically reduce the number of requests required, so you get better matches faster. We can also move some processing out of the SongKong itself on the server simplifying SongKong code development and reducing CPU usage, giving additional speedups. Our Discogs server will be updated monthly from the latest data provided by Discogs.


Genre Grey Lists
Now SongKong comes with a genre list Grey List that allows you to control what genres are used. Because genres are subjective there is no correct genre for a release but grey lists let you configure
how genres should be processed.

When songs are matched to a Discogs release we check the genres provided by Discogs for that release against the genres listed below, if the Discogs release has multiple genres in this list then we use the genre that comes earliest in this list, so the order of the list is important - if you want to keep them you should put more specialist genres such as 'Power pop' before more general categories such as 'Pop'. If no match is found no genres will be added to songs matched to that release. Having found a match SongKong uses that value if that is the only value on the line, but if there is a ';' and then a second value it will use that second value, this is useful for mapping multiple similar genres to a single genre.

Example:Map three genres to one
All three genres are mapped to a more generic genre when such specific genres are not required

Black Metal;Metal
Goth Metal;Metal
Doom Metal;Metal

Exampleealing with spelling variations
Maps Bossa nova to Bossanova, Bossanova is allowed through untouched

Bossanova
Bossa nova;Bossanova

The default list is a list of all the styles and genres currently in the Discogs database with no additional mapping. But this is just the start, more improvements to come with later releases of SongKong.


New Update from Metadata Option
Previously SongKong could either rematch all songs or ignore songs already matched but now there is a new option Update Metadata and Filename Only that can be selected from For songs already matched to MusicBrainz on the first tab.

With the default Update Metadata and Filename Only option SongKong will only try to match songs that have not already been matched to MusicBrainz previously, but it will update existing matches with the latest data or make adjustments based on customer preferences. For example if Update Artwork was disabled when originally matched and it is now enabled SongKong will check for artwork without modifying the releases that the songs have already been matched to. Or if you have changed your file rename mask then the new mask will be applied to these already matched songs in additionally to newly matched songs.

If the option is Rematch then SongKong disregards any matching previously done by SongKong or any other MusicBrainz enabled tagger such as Jaikoz and rematches from scratch.

If the option is Ignore then SongKong ignores any songs already matched to MusicBrainz releases and does not process them any further. Note that songs matched to a MusicBrainz recording only or a Discogs release are not ignored.

When Tracks contain Featured Artists Option

This new option is available on the Fix Songs Format tab.

Sometimes tracks are credited to multiple artists, and with the default Add all contributing artists to the artist field option set all these artists will be used in the artist field for this song. But sometimes this can make it difficult to organize your songs because songs by the same main artist can be split up by your music player, if the artist worked with a number of contributing artists. To make things simpler we can ignore these additional artists by selecting the Only use main artist in the artist field and discard other artists option

 

[ijabz]

Aiff Support added to SongKong 3.18

It has taken a while but Im pleased to announce the latest version of the automated music tagger now fully supports reading and writing Aiff metadata. I know many of you continue to use this format and hope that this will be helpful to you.

http://blog.jthink.net/2015/10/aiff-and-wav-tagging-now-available.html