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Tagging Classical Music:Part 2 - A Sensible and Configurable Track Artist

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We saw in Tagging Classical Music Part 1 how the Track Artist provided by MusicBrainz is great for Pop/Rock music but not for Classical music.

What is Classical Music ?

To be able to do something clever for Classical music first of all we need to identify what is Classical music. The definition is not clear cut but SongKong uses various heuristics to try identify if a song is Classical, these include considering the composer (if any), the level of works, acoustic analysis, the record label, identification of orchestras and choirs in the performers and text analysis of the release and song title. We build a probability based on all these factors and if the probability is high enough the track is marked as IsClassical

Note:However it should be said if you have no Classical music or do not want to treatyour Classical Music differently you can disable this by disabling the Automatically Identify Songs that are part of Classical releases and apply those changesoption on the Classicaltab


A Configurable Track Artist

Once a track is defined as being Classical the Classicaloptions within SongKong come into effect. The MusicBrainz Track Artist option allows you to configure from a number of different options, the default is Performers and Choir/Orchestra/Ensemble and Conductor - note the Composer is not included.

SongKong then builds this track artist by looking at the Track Artist Credits, Recording Artist Credits, Release Artist Advanced Relationships and Recording Artist Advanced relationships. 

It also does additional text based analysis, to take a very simplistic example if there is artist credit containing the word Orchestra in the title then that artist would be considered to be an orchestra even if there is no performing orchestra advanced relationship for this track.

Another example is that we have identified over 3000 Classical composers that died before 1900, we can be mostly sure that if one of these artists is credited on a track that their role was composer rather than performer even if there is no composer credit listed.

The data is not always complete but by using the above techniques we can usually create a track artist credit that matches the option chosen.




Tagging Classical Music:Part 3 - More Fields Required

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Go back to previous sectionPart 2 - A more Sensible Track Artist
 
How metadata is added to music files is largely determined by what went before. Different audio formats use different metadata mechanisms but the most significant one is ID3. This format was originally created for mp3s but is also used for other formats such as AIFF and WAV. 

ID3 Specification

Now the ID3 specification does consider Classical music a little:

  TIT1
The 'Content group description' frame is used if the sound belongs to
a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is
often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. "Piano Concerto",
"Weather - Hurricane").

TIT2
The 'Title/Songname/Content description' frame is the actual name of
the piece (e.g. "Adagio", "Hurricane Donna").
 
so in Classical music TIT1 was originally really intended for the Work. However this field is typically called Grouping and used for all kinds of different things not related to a work, typically as as a way of categorising music further with sub-genres or moods.

 TIT3
The 'Subtitle/Description refinement' frame is used for information
directly related to the contents title (e.g. "Op. 16" or "Performed
live at Wembley").
 
TIT3 is usually known as the Subtitle field, we see here that the Opus could be stored in this field but the title can contain all kinds of additional information not just the Opus so it is not very helpful. it is never a good idea to use the same field for different types of information.

User Defined Text Information Frames

So the standard ID3 fields do not properly support Classical music. However ID3 also supports user defined text fields known as TXXX fields and this allows us to store name/value pairs for any additional data. This is also the same as how all metadata is stored in Flac and OggVorbis file formats.

Do not Lose the Semantic Meaning

If we consider the Track Artist again once the performers, orchestra and conductor have been added to this field it is difficult to work out what their role is. So we want to also capture the information in particular fields such as Orchestra or Choir.
 
SongKong can define additional fields that can be used by any other application. Sometimes there are existing defacto standards that we can use, and sometimes we have to define additional new fields. We store this additional textual metadata and then applications and customers can make use of this metadata as required. We also publish details of these fields and make then available in our jaudiotagger software library so they can easily be used by other applications.

Songkong has added many fields that are particularly useful for Classical such as


  • CLASSICAL_CATALOG
  • OPUS
  • RANKING
  • PART 
  • PART_TYPE
  • WORK
  • WORK_TYPE
  • CHOIR
  • ORCHESTRA
  • ENSEMBLE
  • PERFORMER_NAME
  
We will discuss these in a later post 
 
 
Part 2 - A more Sensible Track Artist

SongKong 4.1 released 3rd of October 2016

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We are pleased to announce that a major new version of SongKong is available today

The main focus of this release is once again support for Classical Music tagging but there are other things as well


  • We now allow you specify almost any fields that you do not want Songkong to modify, and also any fields that you only want SongKong to modify if they are currently empty. Both of these options are on the Format tab
  • We have similar options for just Classical music so that you can configure SongKong to usually modify a field but not if it has been identified as a Classical song.
  • Added option for Classical to remove the composer from the AlbumArtist field, since the composer is not usually a performer.
  • Added option Shorten Work:Movement track titles to just Movement where possible - so your classical tracks just have the movement in the title.
  • Now Classical groups are categorised as Orchestra, Choir or Ensemble, previously the Orchestra field was used for all types.
  • Added isclassical as a field that can be used in rename masks
  • Added Ranking and Classical Catalog No fields, we already had Opus but these fields allow us to add other ways of cataloging classical releases
  • Fixes to allow encoding of filename on filesystems that do not support 16bit characters in filenames.
You can download the latest version from here

Tagging Classical Music:Part 4 - Opus and Ranking

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Back to Part 3 - More Fields Required

One issue with Classical music is Classical composers were not the most imaginative when naming their works and it can be difficult to differentiate one work from another. Conversely the same single work can be available on many different releases but not consistently named by the record companies making it difficult to identify when you have different versions of the same work.

Some composers used the Opus catalog mechanism to organize their works, if used in conjunction with the composer this can be helpful for organizing your music.

 

Opus

Many Classical composers used the Opus (Op.) number. The concept was to catalogue each work as they were published, so the Opus provides a list of all the composers works in date order.

However some composers only bothered to catalog their best works, some only used it for certain types of works and  some didn't use the system at all. 

An Opus can contain multiple works. most famously Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”  was part of twelve violin concertos all written between 1723 to 1725 packaged as Opus 8 “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione”.

Sometimes works were only produced after the composers death. 
 For example Schubert’s last three piano sonatas, which were written in the last months of his life, but were not published until about ten years after his death are written Op.  posth[umous].

 
Ranking

Whereas the Opus should identify all a composers works in date order, the ranking (No.)  is used to catalog all works of a particular type

For example Beethoven wrote 9 symphonies, numbered 1 to 9  in chronological order, and 16 string quartets numbered 1 to 16.

Mozart wrote 40 symphonies, but these are numbered 1-41 because the Symphony No. 37 in G major, K. 444 was found to be composed by Michael Haydn  and was removed from Mozart’s catalogue, so there can be gaps.


Opus with Multiple works

Remember an Opus can contain multiple works. With  L. van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 8 Opus 59 No. 2 in E minor, there are two numbers No. 2 and No. 8. The No. 8 refers to the  ranking among his sixteen string quartets; but the No. 2 actually represent the sub-opus number (the second piece within the Op 59).


SongKong 

SongKong intelligently extracts Opus and Ranking numbers into their own fields. Now they are in their own fields they can help you to search and organize your collection and they can also be used to construct new filenames for these classical compositions.

But other cataloging methods have been developed for certain composers and we will discuss that next

Back to Part 3 - More Fields Required

SongKong 4.2 Released October 18th 2016

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Pleased to announce that SongKong 4.2 was released on October 18th 2016. This new release has a number of fixes and improvements


Add Composer to Album Artist


Classical music albums often contains the composer name as a part of the album title but not always. Different composers often named their works simply such as Symphony No 1 so without the composer name it can be difficult to distinguish one album from another. With this option enabled SongKong will add the composer(s) surnames to the start of the album title if the composer is not in the current title (retrieved from MusicBrainz/Discogs) to help with easier album identification.


Other Fixes

  • [SONGKONG-1051] - Ensure AlbumArtist always set even if album has no album artist
  • [SONGKONG-1053] - Add option to include composer in album title for Classical
  • [SONGKONG-1054] - Romanize non-latin artist names should apply to all people
  • [SONGKONG-1058] - Bundle Java with linux headless on website
  • [SONGKONG-1024] - When run songkong from cmdline log output from jaudiotagger goes to console
  • [SONGKONG-1052] - When Part derived from MusicBrainz has a leading space character
  • [SONGKONG-1055] - Discogs match/update ignoring isClassical Never Modify/Modify if Empty option

Jaikoz 9 Released 1st November 2016

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Pleased to announce a new major version of Jaikoz, this release contains many improvements, fixes and some significant infrastructure work.

Mood, BPM and Key Tagging

Jaikoz Pro users can now make use AcousticBrainz - analysis has been done on millions of songs that are in the MusicBrainz database, when Jaikoz matches a song to MusicBrainz that has been acoustically analysed it can be update with the AcousticBrainz metadata, and this is all easily visible in the Mood tab of the Detail panel


DSF Support

DSD is a technology first used with Super Audio Cd's (SACD), it uses pulse-density modulation encoding a diffierence approach to other lossles formats like WAV and AIFF. The signal is stored as delta-sigma modulated digital audio; a sequence of single-bit values at a sampling rate of 2.8224 MHz (64 times the CD Audio sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, but only at 132768 of its 16-bit resolution). DSF is a way of storing this format in files with metadata and is gaining in popularity on hi end audio systems.

Jaikoz fully supports DSF, including acoustic fingerprinting and all metadata fields.

 

New Never Modify/Modify If Empty Options

Previously most fields had their own option that allowed you to configure Jaikoz to always modify, modify if empty or never modify the field, and the option was repeated for MusicBrainz match and Discogs match. But it was very cumbersome if you suddenly wanted to change the option for a number of fields. We have now replaced by a list of fields that you can easily modify for each option.

 

Performers

Jaikoz now properly supports editing of the Performer and Involved Person fields, these fields allow you to add additional people involved in the song whatever their role, be it musician or art direction



Classical Tagging

Jaikoz now supports many new fields including many new Classical fields, these Classical fields are all visible on the Detail tab. Auto population of the new Classical fields can currently be done with SongKong  but will be added to a future release of Jaikoz.



Full Change List


The full list of improvements can be found at http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/news/start.jsp

Tagging Classical Music:Part 5 - Classical Classification

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Go back to Part 4 - Opus and Ranking

In the previous section we saw how that classical composers in centuries gone by often used the opus and ranking system to classify releases, we also saw they didn't do a very good job of it !

But in the case of the major composers after they died often a good soul came along and tried to catalog their works in a more consistent way. This is called classical classification and is an attempt to classify all of a composers works, it is completely separate from the record label catalogue given to a new CD release by the record company.

Usually catalogues are in chronological order but sometimes they are a thematic catalogue.
For example Johann Sebastian Bach, uses the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis).  The BWV catalog is thematic so a lower number does not mean it is an earlier composition, for example his cantatas are numbered BWV 1 to 244 and Violin concertos BWV 1046 to 1051. 

There are no other composers whose work is catalogued using BMV numbers so it quite simple to extract them from the song/work  title into the Classical Catalog  field and that is what SongKong does. But things aren't so simple the following composers all use a H (Haydn uses Hob as well) prefix
  • Haydn
  • Hector Berlioz
  • Bohuslav Martinu
  • Gustav Holst
and of course there are song titles that contain H. without it signifying a classical catalogue no.

Luckily because the MusicBrainz database stores the composer separately SongKong only attempts to find a classical catalog no when it has identified the composer of the piece, and then it will search for the correct classical catalog pattern(s) for that composer. This ensures that when SongKong has extracted a classical catalog no it gets it right 

This field offers another way to organize works by the major composers. 

Go back to Part 4 - Opus and Ranking

Grouping field no longer working in iTunes ?

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In October iTunes added some long overdue better support for classical releases in the form of new moment, movement no, total and work fields. This allows movements within a release to be shown together, and really helps for classical releases, especially when you have an album containing multiple works. This is exciting news for SongKong and Jaikoz and we are working on adding support for auto population of these fields in the next release.


However these new fields have caused a problem.




Why is my grouping column blank for newly imported files ?

 

MP3 and AIFF files use the ID3 metadata format for storing information about the music such as the artist or album name. ID3 did not have any fields (known as frames) defined for most of these new fields so Apple has defined some:

MVNM - Movement
MVIN - MovementNo/MovementTotal


But ID3 does already have a field that could possibly be used for storing the work, the TIT1 frame, this is how it is defined in the ID3 specification document.



The 'Content group description' frame is used if the sound belongs to a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. "Piano Concerto","Weather - Hurricane").

This definition is a bit open to interpretation so over the years the frame has been used by different applications in different ways, both as a work and as a way to group multiple tracks in other ways. For example in SongKong it can be used to store genres as a list of values because iTunes Genre can only see the first value, a problem if you want to categorize a song with multiple genres.

In fact until version iTunes 12.5.3 iTunes have always used this frame for the Grouping field. When you update to the version of iTunes your existing files will appear unchanged, but any grouping data that was stored in the TIT1 frame has now silently been moved to iTunes internal database only.


But when you import any new music that had the grouping field set you'll see it no longer shows in the Grouping field of iTunes but the Work field, and this also applies if you update any music outside of iTunes that is already in your iTunes library.
 

You can see this by going to the Songs view and enabling the Work column, and there are all the missing groups.




I created this test from SongKong very simply by 
- Ensuring Update Genres and Save changes to iTunes was enabled on the Basic tab




- Setting Grouping to Always Replace Values on the Genres tab







- and  running against a folder of MP3 files

 

 

So you can't use the Grouping field anymore, right ?


Well no, once you have added your songs to iTunes you can enter data into the Grouping field and it will persist. But it's no longer actually stored in the TIT1 field itself. Instead it is only added to iTunes internal database. But the problem with this is you can only fill in the Grouping field manually from within iTunes after the file has been imported in.  Then once done to get that Grouping data out you would have to use iTunes AppleScript (OS X) or the COM API on Windows, this makes it very difficult to use your organize your songs consistently in both multiple places, such as using with both iTunes and Sonos.





Now for the really crazy part


MP4 files don't use ID3 for metadata they use atoms instead and the ©grp atom does continue to correctly map to the Grouping field if you import MP4 files.

This is because for MP4 Apple has defined the following new fields:

@mvn Movement
@mvi MovemntNo
@mvc MovemntTotal
@wrk Work


So there are separate fields for Grouping and Work !

 

 

Why didn't they define a separate field for Work for ID3 ?


That is the question, by adding new the new frames MVNM and MVIN frames they are already not strictly adhering to the specification anyway so the argument cannot be they did not want to break the standard


What does this mean for me ?


It means that if you use iTunes that when editing metadata for files outside of iTunes you need to consider different audio formats differently.
 

If you have a mix of Classical and non-Classical and you use AIFF or MP3 then it may be wise not to use the Grouping field for anything other than Works.

One question that requires more thought is when importing MP4 does it make sense to add tracks with the same Work as part of the same Grouping or not.

We will be adding options to SongKong and Jaikoz to make this as simple as we possibly can

Within iTunes it is probably best to decide on a format and stick to it, transcoding different audio formats to a single format.


  

ITunes add a new Grouping field but Ignores the Existing one !

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In this previous post I explained the good news for Classical music fans that iTunes now has support for works and movements. But the bad news for Mp3 and Aif formats was that it was now using the TIT1 field to store the Work instead of the Grouping. This meant the Grouping field could only be set within iTunes and was stored in the database.

I have just installed iTunes v12.5.4.42 and this has changed.

iTunes has now added a GRP1 field for formats that use the ID3 metadata format such as Mp3 and Aif formats. The good news is that now you can set the Grouping and Work fields from outside iTunes by writing data to the GRP1 and TIT1  fields respectively. 

But the bad news is that ever other player out there uses TIT1 for grouping so if grouping is important to you and you need to play your songs on iTunes and other players you have a problem.

Because if you set the Work field in iTunes, this will be seen as the Grouping field in other applications. If you set the Grouping field in iTunes this will have no affect in other applications because they don't support the new GRP1 field

It would have been infinitely more sensible for iTunes to leave the TIT1 field alone and define a new field to store the Work

Just in time for Xmas, new releases of Jaikoz and SongKong

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We are pleased to announce the release of Jaikoz 9.1.0 and SongKong 4.3 today


Classical Feature Parity

We have made lots of improvements to classical matching in SongKong, but even better the whole classical matching functionality has now been added to Jaikoz. Classical matching now works the same in both applications and all the Classical music options that were in SongKong are now in Jaikoz as well.


 

Support for iTunes Work and Movement fields

Recently iTunes added support for Work, Movement and Movement No. SongKong already had support for deriving this information from classical releases but now it writes this information to the equivalent iTunes fields so you can now use SongKong to update these new columns for your classical releases. And even better news is that Jaikoz does this as well.

We will explain how this works in more detail in another blog post.

 

New Field Mappings

These it is quite customary to transcode music collections from lossless to lossy so that you have a high quality version of your music for your hi-fi system and smaller files for use on your iPod or car stereo. 

We have noted that transcoders such as dbPoweramp do an excellant job of converting the audio, and a reasonable job of converting the metadata for the standard fields like album, artist and title. But they dont do such a good job of converting custom fields such as MusicBrainz Ids or the classical fields we have recently added such because they expect the fieldname to be exactly the same on all metadata formats. For MusicBrainz Ids this is not the case, i.e the MusicBrainzReleaseId field is called MusicBrainz Album Id for Mp3 and Aiff files but MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID for Flac and Ogg files. 

We cannot change how MusicBrainz Ids are stored but we have revised the mappings for some of our recently added new classical fields in order to make it easier for metadata to be maintained when the files are transcoded.

This means in Jaikoz  you many notice that some fields seem to be empty when you load them, just run Update Metadata from MusicBrainz to re-add the data to the newly mapped fields.

 

Acoustid Song Only Metadata

The Acoustid database is crowd-sourced and when songs are submitted to Acoustid they are submitted with their metadata. If this none of the songs submitted for a particular Acoustid fingerprint include a MusicBrainz Id then the Acoustid is not linked to MusicBrainz but the basic metadata - artist, album and title are available from Acoustid 

Now when a song is matched to an Acoustid with no links to MusicBrainz metadata but with some basic metadata we use this metadata if our song doesn't already contain that information. In the SongChanges part of the report such songs are labelled (Acoustid Song Only)

This is great when your songs contained no metadata since the Acoustid database is larger than the MusicBrainz database. Also there are some songs that are in both Acoustid and MusicBrainz databases but not currently linked so adding this metadata increases the chance of your songs being matched to MusicBrainz by metadata (and Discogs).


 

When tracks contains featured artists

We have also added the When tracks contains featured artists option to Jaikoz this give you options when a track lists both a main artist and featured artists.



Tagging Classical Music:Part 6 - Movements and Works

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Back to Part 5 - Classical Classification
 
We have seen in earlier articles how the Track Artist field is not well suited for Classical music because there are many artists involved in a piece of Classical music.

The other major problem with Classical Music is the Albumwith Tracks format usually doesn't represent the artistic intent of the composers(s) of the music, there is a parallel structure we want to capture comprised of Movements and Works.

Movements and Works

Classical Composers usually think in terms of a Work, such as Symphony or Sonatacontaining multiple parts known as Movements. This is certainly true of the masters like Bach and Beethoven, remember when they wrote their masterpieces there was no way to actually capture a performance, audio could not be recorded.

Albums

Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, then from 1948 as vinyl LP records played at  33 1⁄3 rpm, then Compact Discs and then various formats that can be saved to a computer  drive.

The album represents the artistic intent of the performer, and for pop/rock music this is often the composer and is the primary means of distributing their music, but this is not the case with Classical music, which may have been written hundreds of years before.


Classical Albums

So a classical album can contain multiple works by different composers with the only connection being they are being performed by the same orchestra or soloist.

Sometimes the album contains a complete work and sometimes only certain movements of a work

We want to capture the Work structure in parallel to the Album structure. Support for Works has been poor but is now improving since iTunes have recently added a new Work field, and where iTunes leads others usually follow.


Movements and Tracks


A single movement is usually represented by a single track, so we have a nice one-one representation. The difficulty with tracks as we have seen is they can contain alot of work information and this can make the track name unwieldy. If we know that tracks 1-3 are movements I-III of a particular work then there is no real need to repeat the work information in the title. What we really need is a separate Movement field, and again iTunes have now added a Movement field.


Movement No and Track Nos

So if we have an album consisting of tracks 1-5 representing the five movements from one work and tracks 6-10 representing five movements from another work we want to capture this information, and this is the purpose of the Movement No and Movement Total fields. These fields index the tracks in relation to the work they are part of.


Jaikoz and SongKong

Jaikoz and SongKong already support these new fields and have full integration with iTunes. Hopefully other players will add support for all these fields very soon. 

Here is a simple example

Movement      :Allegro non troppo
Work          :Piano Concerto no. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83
Movement No   :1
Movement Total:5

Part          :I. Allegro non troppo
Part Number   :I
Work Type     :Concerto


New version of SongKong 4.3 now available

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Yesterday we released SongKong 4.3, but there was one rather significant bug that we didn't pick up on testing. 

If you have never installed SongKong before then this version looks for a recent path setting in your properties  and because this is not set it actually prevents SongKong from starting.

This is now fixed, and to enable the quickest deployment and because there are no functionality changes we have just replaced the existing 4.3 with a new version of 4.3. 

Simply redownload if you have had this issue, and sorry for the hassle.

 

SongKong 4.4 released December 19th 2016

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We introduced a bug into SongKong 4.3 that meant it wasn't closing its connections to its internal database properly and this meant it could run out of database connections and then hang in some circumstances.

We have been working over this weekend to get this resolved, and now fixed in this new SongKong 4.4 release

Updating iTunes Work and Movement fields easily with SongKong

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iTunes now supports movements and works for Classical music but does not provide any way to automatically add data to these fields. So if you are using iTunes as an editor it becomes very time consuming to add this new data.

The screencast belowis a tutorial on the Mac, and the tutorial in this blog post is for Windows, steps are the same for both. 


 

Adding Only Works and Movements for iTunes

Luckily both SongKong and Jaikoz can now add this data for you totally automatically. This guide explains how this works with SongKong. In this walkthroughwe are going to limitSongKong to only update the Work related fields. But of course it can be used to identify songs and add the full set of metadata   

  • For the purpose of this guide I have created an iTunes database consisting of just three albums that we are going to update in one go with SongKong. Two albumsare classical music album that we know to contain works and movements and one regular rock album. I have enabled the Movement, Workand Movement No columns in the Song View, and they are currently empty of data. 
  • And the Album view does not look any different then it would for a Pop/Rock album
  • Lets start SongKong and select your music folder.
  • Start Fix Songs and ensure that Save Changes to iTunes on the Basic tab is enabled. 
  • Go the Format tab, select Never Modify add add all fields to the Selected Fields list except Work, Movement, Movement No and Movement Total so it looks like the screenshot below and select OK
  • Now lets go to the Classical tab, the defaults are tuned for iTunes. Most notably if you have files in the AIF or MP3 format you really need Copy Work to Grouping field to be set to MP3 and AIF (iTunes)
  • Now press Start and wait for the identification and iTunes update to complete. 
  • If we look at the report that is created we can see that the Movement and Work fields have been added for the Classical releases.

  • Lets go over to iTunes, we can now see that the movement and work data has been added.
  • But if we go the Album View the work and movement data is still not displayed.
  • Now this is because of the one manual step potentially required. Sometimes we need to go back to the Songs View and sort by Work, then select all the songs that have a value for work, and select Get Info
  • Now checkthe new Use Work and Movementoption


  • If we now go back to the Album View and look at these albums we see songs are now grouped by Work (e.g Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80) and therefore can use the short Movement Name instead of the the longer Song Title (e.g III Andante instead of Sonata for violin & piano No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80: Andante). iTunes also derives a Movement No using Roman numeral notation derived from the Movement No

     
  • For songs already added to iTunes before these new options were introduced into iTunes the Use Work and Movement option may need checking. For songs added since iTunes 12.5 it seems this option is checked by default so this extra step may not be necessary.
The reason we matched to three albums, was to show that the manual step can be applied to all albums with works in a single step, it doesn't have to be applied one album at a time   

So as you can see we can easily use SongKong to identify classical music and the work and grouping metadata, the process is very similar for Jaikoz.

And you can use an identical method onOSX and Windows.

All the new work and movement metadata is stored in the file themselves so you can also run SongKong without enabling the Save to iTunes option. Then at a later date select all the files in iTunes and useGet Infoto update with any changes made by SongKong
  

    Limiting long filenames when matching Classical releases

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    The Problem with Long Filenames


    SongKong and Jaikoz both allow you to rename your music files based on their metadata, and this is an important step of keeping your music collection in sync. The total file length is guaranteed by both to be no longer than the maximum allowed on your OS, for example the maximum on Windows is the relatively low 259 characters

    However you may want the maximum to be shorter than that, some of my PS Audio customers have alerted me to a couple of reasons why: 

    1. Classical music matched to MusicBrainz can sometimes use a rather long value for the album field because editors shoehorn extra information into album title such as additional musicians involved as here:




    or to capture additional details such as here:



    According to the style guidelines this should not usually happen but sometimes it does
     

    2. Some players such as JRiver Media Centre just do not like filenames this long

    My proposed solution

    So I added setting a user defined limit for the filepath length option to my list of improvements to make, this would simply truncate the filename if it was too long.

    A Better Idea

    But then another customer JazzNut came up with an even better idea, would it be possible to add this rule to the rename mask ?

    Yes, of course - this is how I did it in SongKong

    1. On the File Naming tab, set the Filename Masks dropdown so it is the same as your chosen rename mask, and open it up for editing by selecting the Edit button. 








    2. Then use the length function to test the length of the album field, and the substring function to output a truncated version of the album field.

    i.e (album.length>100 ? album.substring(0,100):album) to give new mask, then select OK  to save the changes.






    3. Repeat the process to modify the compilation rename mask if this is different to the rename mask

    You can use this approach to limit the length of any field, artist and title fields can get long as well, you can use the same approach in Jaikoz as well.





    SongKong 4.5 released with Classical and iTunes improvements

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    We start the New Year with a new SongKong release, this one concentrates on two aspects, Classical music and iTunes.

    Classical 

    New Option:Only use Artist Type to categorise groups as ensembles, choirs or orchestra

    Every artist in MusicBrainz is categorised as either a choir, orchestra, group or person. But sometimes a group may be a credited as an orchestra or choir on a particular release, and when this occurs we credit that artist as an orchestra or choir for the particular songs in that release. However this can mean that within your songs metadata the same artist is sometimes added to the Orchestra or Choir field and sometimes the Ensemble field depending on what release the song is from, if instead you wish a particular artist to be categorised the same way throughout your collection enable this option.  





    New Option:Allow changes to songs existing metadata fields if song only match

    When SongKong can match a song but not determine the album it will update song metadata such as song title but not album metadata such as Album Title or Track No regardless of any existing metadata. This means that the song is identified and updated with useful metadata without making any changes that would prevent it being identified as part of the same group on a subsequent run of Fix Songs

    However even modifying only Song Only metadata such as the Song Title or Track Artist could still change values significantly so that there is a difference between these songs and the totally unmatched songs. This difference is more likely when dealing with Classical release since there is not a single standard way that these fields are used with Classical music, for example you may have some songs where the work has been included in the song title and others where only the movement is used. If you disable this option then it will only update fields that are currently empty and this may better preserve consistency if some songs in an album are matched song only and some are not matched at all. The disadvantage of disabling this option is this can prevent SongKong replacing existing incorrect metadata with correct metadata.


    Advanced modification of Classical Identification

    One way that SongKong identifies classical releases is looking for releases that have credits to particular people known to work only on Classical music. This list is available within classical_people.txt, here is a small section, each line has the MusicBrainz Artist Id and then Artist Name

                   1f9df192-a621-4f54-8850-2c5373b7eac9 = Ludwig van Beethoven
                   d01c08ad-f09f-4396-b8a7-e27ae146ea27 = Ludwig von Széchényi
                   5a4ae8d0-7ee4-4e83-bb89-1cfc9cf63d8b = Ludwik Osiński
                   676bf1b0-b834-4117-86d2-ceba42fac051 = Luigi Badia
                   688986c3-da7b-4465-92cb-f4736c94f2cd = Luigi Balestra
                   cc272df6-a476-4d30-9ede-a47db04d8813 = Luigi Bassi
                   5c1a3f8f-d5e5-4dcd-9e44-9443f06bb77d = Luigi Boccherini
                   d6077dc7-7bdb-4cc8-9425-fb80bf2dff41 = Luigi Caracciolo
                   375d52ad-5b7a-4f96-80e2-6d9ad13f5160 = Luigi Cherubini
                   63b22cde-9b11-4465-83bf-ecf374eb490e = Luigi Gordigiani

               
    The term Classical is used here in the most general sense so that anyone who died before music could be recorded is included plus Classical composers and conductors of the 19th and 20th century, in total there are about 6000 people listed. If you are finding that certain releases credited to a particular person are being classified as Classical when you do not want them to be you can search this file for that person and remove that line, you can also add people to this file using the format MusicBrainz Artist Id = Name

    There is also a classical_composers.txt file, like all automated music taggers SongKong is always dealing with incomplete databases, a particular problem for classical music is that the database may have the list of credits for a release but not their particular role, e.g. Is Person B a composer, performer or conductor. SongKong has created a list of people who principal activity is composing so when we find this person credited on a release we can usually assume that they are the composer even if they do not have a composer credit on that particular release.

    The smaller classical_conductors.txt list works the same way for conductors, both these files can be edited in the same way as the classical_people.txt file in order to fine tune your classical metadata requirements. If a person is a composer and conductors (or performer) then they will not be included in the composer/conductor list unless the vast majority of their credits are for one particular role

    iTunes 

    Working with iTunes is difficult since it can be configured many different ways. For example multiple libraries can be created in different locations. iTunes can make copies of every music file added (the default on OSX but not on Windows) and it can rename files automtically when their metadata changes. The configuration of these iTunes options are not available in the API that iTunes provides developers with so some guesswork is required.

    One particular problem is that a customer may have iTunes configured to copy media files but when using SongKong open the location of the original file rather than the one now under iTunes control. We now warn the user when we detect this to try and prevent this common mistake that can cause to duplicate songs to be added to iTunes.

    We also now have an iTunes summary that details the location of the iTunes media location plus a count of how many new songs were added to iTunes and how many songs already known to iTunes have been updated.

    The library we use to talk to iTunes on Windows has been replaced with a newer one that is btter supported.

    Full List of Fixes

    The full list of fixes can be found on the News page
     

    Rename any file based on existing metadata with SongKong

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    SongKong 4.6 released with a number of improvements. 

    Most notably the Rename files based on Metadata when Matched checkbox has now become a combo called Rename files based on metadata.  


    Previously SongKong would only rename files when your files were matched to either a MusicBrainz or Discogs release. This ensured we only renamed files when were sure we had a good match, we had album metadata and all the songs of the same release were matched.

    But the drawback of this approach was that if you had songs with perfectly good metadata but not matched by SongKong then you could not use SongKong to rename them.

    Also if SongKong could identify the song but just not decide on the release then again you could not use SongKong to rename them. This was a particular problem for DJ's where often the album metadata was not really important anyway.

     

    Rename Files from Metadata Options

    By default this option this set to No. It can be very useful to name files based on the current metadata but this can cause problems for any other applications that index files by their file name. For example if you are using a music manager application and rename a file that is under the music managers control then it will not be able to find it, it is usually better to use SongKong on songs before adding them to a music manager. But if you are using iTunes then SongKong can inform of iTunes of changes that SongKong makes so that iTunes does not lose the file.

    This option is not simply Yes or No, you can decide to rename songs based on how and/or.if they have been matched. Often the best choice is Yes if matched to a release this ensures that songs are only renamed if matched to a MusicBrainz or Discogs release, this in turn ensures that complete albums of songs are renamed and therefore kept together.

    Alternatively the Yes if matched to a release or song option can be used, this additionally allows songs that have been matched to a MusicBrainz song but not a release. This ensures that all the songs renamed will have reliable basic metadata, but if you have a folder of songs representing an album and they have only been matched to a song it could cause them to be put into different folders.

    The Yes if has metadata option allows any song to be renamed even if not matched by SongKong as long as it contains the basic metadata of Title, Album and either Artist or Album Artist. This option allows SongKong to be used for any collection of songs even when the songs could not be found in the MusicBrainz or Discogs databases.

    The Yes, for all files option takes this a step further allowing any song to be renamed regardless of the status of it's existing metadata.

    How to move the SongKong database to a different disk on your Mac

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    For the most part SongKong does matching on a folder by folder basis and because it is only working on a few folders at any instant in time this means it can usually fix thousands and thousands of songs without using that much of your computers memory.

    But it does need to store your file metadata details and details of the progress it is making and this is stored on your disk drive in a database. Compared to memory disk space is cheap and plentiful, a typically computer may have 8GB of memory but 500 GB of disk space.

    On OSX the database is always stored in  ~Library:Preferences:SongKong and the Library folder is usually on your local hard drive. If you have a small or full internal hard drive this can present a problem because SongKong does not give you an option to store the database somewhere else.

    Empty Database


    If the database has just grown too large over time use File:Empty Database to clear it out. Remember that the database is where SongKong stores the modiifed metadata allowing it to Undo Changes, so once you've done emptied it you cannot undo any previous changes.

    Move Database

    If you simply do not have space on your main drive for the SongKong database using symbolic links as follows:

    1. Close SongKong if running
    2. Run Application:Utilities:Terminal
    3. Enter commands to create new database folder in your chosen location, then remove the old database folder and create a symbolic link file with the same name point to the new location.

    If your new location is an external drive then it should be listed under the /Volumes directory, do not use a network directory that will be too slow. In the screenshot below I have given full example for linking to a new Database on a usb stick mounted on OSX as /Volumes/UUI, you just need to change the references to UUI to the correct location for your drive, everything else should be the same.

    4. Now start SongKong, it should say its creating a new database.
    5. If you like you can check it is done in the right place by running this command from the Terminal, remembering to replace UUI  with the correct path for your system

    SongKong 3.23 now supports DSF audio fingerprinting and metadata tagging

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    This new release of SongKong has a a host of new features and improvements


    Perhaps most exciting is support for the DSF format

    DSF is the DSD format stored as a regular file with metadata support. DSD is a PDM encoding of audio, essentially the audio can be seen as a stream of bits that can be on or off, the more ones in a row the greater the amplitude they represent. This simple encoding can allow a better representation of the original analog sound, hence potentially better representation of the original analog recording.




    SongKong supports audio fingerprinting, song identification and adding of metadata to the DSF format. DSF supports the ID3 metadata format, exactly the same as MP3 and AIFF files so this means we can store all the great same metadata including cover art as these other formats

    New Options

    There are a host of other new features, including the following new options suggested by some of our PS Audio customers

    1. Ability to not modify Artist, Album Artist, Sort Artist, Album Artist, Composer and Sort Composer to help with Classical/Jazz collections
    2. Option to use JRiver compatible field for Album Artist for Flac/Ogg files.
    3. Easy option to set max file path length 


    Better Matching

    And now we have even better matching

    1. Better matching for individual songs.
    2. Better identification and matching of Multi Disc releases

    3. Use of Acoustids to match individual songs to Discogs when no match in MusicBrainz. 

    Helping out Hi-end audiophiles with SongKong Melco and Naim solution

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    On Friday 24th of February we jointly announced a new version of SongKong for Melco, simply called SongKong for Melco. Melco are recognised worldwide for their high quality music library systems made with the highest quality audio specific components that allow music to be stored in digital format and then streamed to a music player or connected directly to a DAC (Digital Audio Converter) for connection to a conventional hi-fi system.

    This was announced at the Bristol Sound & Vision show, click here to view the press release.

    Alan Ainslie from Melco, recognising the difficulty their customers had with poor quality metadata from previously ripped and downloaded songs, came to SongKong for help with devising a simple solution for customers. In partnership with Melco we have already made many improvements for all SongKong customers, especially those with large collections including Classical and Jazz. 

    Additionally with SongKong for Melco we have solved an issue for customers with collection of Naim wav rips. The popular Naim Uniti defaults to ripping to Wav format, it then looks up metadata from AllMusicGuide and Cddb. But this metadata is stored in a file called amginfo.xml or cddb.txt within the same folder as the wav rips for the album rather than stored within the Wav files themselves. This is fine as long as you only play them via Naim but if you copied the files anywhere else no metadata would show up for the Wav files, regardless of if the amginfo.xml or cddb.txt files were copied as well since only Naim Uniti could parse them.

    Add caption

    When the above option is enabled if you have any Naim wav folders that contain the Wavs and the Amginfo.xml/cddb.txt file then the metadata can now be embedded into the Wav files themselves, this can now be read and used by most applications and players such as Minim Server and Foobar2000. Of course you can additionally use SongKongs standard MusicBrainz and Discogs functionality to find additional metadata such as high resolution artwork.
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