SongKong vs Beets 1.6
This articles compares SongKong with the Beets music tagger.
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Select here for a table comparing SongKong with a number of different taggers
Beets 1.6
Beets is a utilitarian automatic tag editor that is aimed at the linux market, it is also possible to install it for Windows and macOS but this not simple to do so most users use it in a linux environment where it is better supported. It has can identify music and do various tagging tasks all from the command line. A major difficulty is that there is no graphical user interface (GUI) so its only really suitable for the real techies.
User Interface
The only user interface provided is the cmdline, before we use Beets we need to create a configuration file or modify an existing one. One reason it has no GUI is because linux machines often comes as servers only without a connected Windows display and this means there is no way to run a GUI directly on the linux server. One solution could be to use the a web browser to control beets but this is not available. Beets comes with many plugins making it very configurable but considerable research has to be done to work out what exactly the plugins do, and how to install and configure them.
Song Identification
Beets can find matches from a MusicBrainz, and also Discogs via a plugin but the matching algorithm appears to be rather simplistic. It is not fully automated because it prompts for us to make a decision when it is not sure about a match, it will continue with other matches so it can be left unattended but may need customer to make decisions to allow it to continue to completion. There is also a quiet mode that does not ask for input but then it skips over many potential matches without doing anything.
Other tasks
Beets provides a series of Plugins for all tasks, these are categorized as Autotagger Plugins, Metadata Plugins, Path Formats Plugins, Interoperability Plugins and Miscellaneous PlugIns.
Autotagger Plugins
This includes the Discogs Plugin for matching from Discogs and the Chromaprint/Acoustid Plugion for audio fingerprinting. One difficulty with plugins is that they work in isolation, for example with the AcoustId plugin enabled beets will now fingerprint all songs even if found a good match without using fingerprinting, if not installed it doesnt use acoustid fingerprints at all, even when it would really help with identification. Another difficulty is the Acoustid plugin is difficult to install.
Metadata Plugins
These do additional formatting on matched albums, similar to some of the options on SongKongs Format and Album Format tabs. For example the FtInTitle Plugin is used for moving featured artists into the song title field.
Path Format Plugins
These plugins are for file renaming and moving like the Rename Files task of SongKong
Interoperability Plugins
These plugins are mainly for updating other music software so they know when beets has modified files. There are plugins for Sonos and Plex, but nothing for Roon, MinimServer or iTunes.
Support
Beets has a user forum and public bug tracker.
Summary
Beets can certainly be used to process your files automatically. However there is a steep learning curve, it is essentially linux only and it is difficult to modify things. The most important task the autotagging is quite limited in what it can do.
SongKong 10.7
SongKong is more user friendly application with a wealth of advanced features not found in beets, to summarize:
- Can automatch libraries of any size
- Automatically add upto 128 metadata fields to matched files
- Also has advanced Delete Duplicates
- Automatch from Discogs and AcoustId Albums as well
- Metagrater for removing metadata
- Support for Artist artwork as well
- Support for Classical music
- Also has a web interface so can be used on headless linux and nas devices and controlled remotely
- Detailed reporting kept for every task run
- Support for iTunes, Apple Music, Roon and MinimServer
Below we compare support for key features, we have considered Beets standard plugins but not 3rd party community plugins
| Feature | SongKong 10.7 | beets 1.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | ||
| MacOS | ||
| Windows | ||
| Linux Desktop | ||
| Linux Headless | ||
| Melco Digital Library | ||
| Docker | ||
| Qnap | ||
| Synology | ||
| Gui | ||
| Desktop | ||
| Web | ||
| Command Line | ||
| Dark Mode | ||
| Song Matching | ||
| Single Album MusicBrainz Matching | ||
| Single Album Discogs Matching | ||
| Match Album by Specified MusicBrainz Album | ||
| Match Album by Specified Discogs Album | ||
| Automatic Multi Album Matching | ||
| Batch AutoMatch Large Libraries | ||
| Acoustid Fingerprint Based Matching | ||
| Combined Acoustid Fingerprinting with Album Matching | ||
| Albunack Disc Id based matching | ||
| Metadata from AcoustId | ||
| Metadata from AcoustId Albums | ||
| Metadata from Naim Wav Metadata | ||
| Artwork | ||
| Front Cover Artwork | ||
| Back Cover Artwork | ||
| Artist Artwork | ||
| Composer, Performer and Label Artwork | ||
| Artwork from Cover Art Archive | ||
| Artwork from FanArt.tv | ||
| Artwork from Discogs | ||
| Metadata Formatting | ||
| Maximum no of different textual metadata Fields that can be auto-added | 128 | 56 |
| Support for Roon fields | ||
| Support for AcousticBrainz fields | ||
| Automatic Classical Music Album Identification | ||
| Classical Music options | ||
| Genre options | ||
| Identify HD Releases | ||
| Custom Album Title Options | ||
| Use Standard Artist name option | ||
| Featured Artist Special Handling | ||
| Featured Album Artist Special Handling | ||
| Conversion of Artist names to Latin/English version | ||
| Use Standard Album name option | ||
| Multi Disc Album Subtitle Handling | ||
| File Renaming | ||
| Scriptable flexible File Renaming | ||
| File Rename mask can be saved | ||
| Simplify non-standard characters | ||
| Limit Path to 259 Windows Character Limit | ||
| Move Additional Files on Rename | ||
| Delete Empty Folders after Renaming | ||
| Delete Duplicates | ||
| Delete by Metadata | ||
| Delete by MusicBrainz Ids | ||
| Delete by Discogs Ids | ||
| Delete by AcoustIds | ||
| Advanced Deletion Criteria | ||
| Check duplicates within single audio format | ||
| Delete Empty Folders after Deletion | ||
| Performance | ||
| Multiple Cpu Support | ||
| Unlimited no of Files processed | ||
| Compatability | ||
| iTunes Integration | ||
| Apple Music Integration | ||
| Roon Integration | ||
| MinimServer Integration | ||
| Audio Format Support | ||
| Flac | ||
| Aif | ||
| Wav | ||
| Dsf | ||
| Ogg | ||
| Mp3 | ||
| M4a | ||
| Mp4 | ||
| Wma | ||
| Save/Undo | ||
| Undo facility after Save | ||
| Review before Save | ||
| Select ID3v23 or ID3v24 tag version | ||
| Automation | ||
| Auto Monitor Folder | ||
| Manual Editing | ||
| Manual Editing of fields | ||
| Artwork Lookup | ||
| Reporting | ||
| Status Report | ||
| Spreadsheet Report | ||
| Detailed Task Report | ||
| Missing Songs Report | ||
| Technical Support | ||
| Regular Code Updates | ||
| User Forum | ||
| Public Bug Tracker | ||
| Send Logs | ||
| Send Reports | ||
| Text Fields that can be autoadded | ||
| AcoustId Fingerprint | ||
| AcoustId Id | ||
| Album | ||
| Album Artist | ||
| Album Artist Sort | ||
| Album Artists | ||
| Album Artists Sort | ||
| Album Version | ||
| Album Year | ||
| Arranger | ||
| Arranger Sort | ||
| Artist | ||
| Artist Sort | ||
| Artists | ||
| Artists_Sort | ||
| ASIN | ||
| Barcode | ||
| BPM | ||
| Catalog Number | ||
| Choir | ||
| Choir Sort | ||
| Classical Catalog | ||
| Classical Nickname | ||
| Composer | ||
| Composer Sort | ||
| Conductor | ||
| Conductor Sort | ||
| Country | ||
| Disc Number | ||
| Disc Subtitle | ||
| Discogs Artist Site URL | ||
| Discogs Release Site URL | ||
| DJ Mixer | ||
| DJ Mixer Sort | ||
| Engineer | ||
| Engineer Sort | ||
| Ensemble | ||
| Ensemble Sort | ||
| Genre | ||
| Grouping | ||
| Instrument | ||
| Involved People | ||
| ISRC | ||
| Is Classical | ||
| Is Compilation | ||
| Is Greatest Hits | ||
| Is Live | ||
| Is Soundtrack | ||
| Key | ||
| Label | ||
| Language | ||
| Lyricist | ||
| Media | ||
| Mixer | ||
| Mixer Sort | ||
| Mood | ||
| Mood Aggressive | ||
| Mood Relaxed | ||
| Mood Sad | ||
| Mood Happy | ||
| Mood Party | ||
| Mood Danceability | ||
| Mood Acoustic | ||
| Mood Electronic | ||
| Mood Instrumental | ||
| Movement | ||
| Movement No | ||
| Movement Total | ||
| MusicBrainz Artist Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Disc Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Original Artist Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Original Release Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Recording Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Release Artist Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Release Group Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Release Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Track Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Composition | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Composition Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Part LevelN N | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Part LevelN Type N Type | ||
| MusicBrainz Work Part LevelN Id | ||
| MusicBrainz Work | ||
| Official Artist Site URL | ||
| Official Release Site URL | ||
| Opus | ||
| Orchestra | ||
| Orchestra Sort | ||
| Original Album | ||
| Original Album Year | ||
| Original Artist | ||
| Original Lyricist | ||
| Original Year | ||
| Overall Work | ||
| Part Number | ||
| Part Type | ||
| Performer | ||
| Performer Name | ||
| Performer Name Sort | ||
| Producer | ||
| Producer Sort | ||
| Recording Start Date | ||
| Recording End Date | ||
| Recording Location | ||
| Release Country | ||
| Release Status | ||
| Release Type | ||
| Remixer | ||
| Script | ||
| Section | ||
| Single Disc Track No | ||
| Subtitle | ||
| Tags | ||
| Title | ||
| Tonality | ||
| Total Discs | ||
| Total Tracks | ||
| Track Number | ||
| Wikipedia Artist Site URL | ||
| Wikipedia Release Site URL | ||
| Work | ||
| Work Type | ||
| Year | ||
Description of Features
Where necessary we explain what some of the features listed above in more detail
Standard Install
Can tagger be installed easily without having to install 3rd party additional software for it to work
Intuitive Ease of Use
Is it possible to start using taggers features by just playing with it, or do you need to read the help first to understand how to use it.
Desktop UI
Does the tagger provide a standard Graphical User Interface (GUI) suitable for the operating system they are running on, for ecxample an application running on MacOS should like a MacOS application, and on Windows it should look like a Windows application. A GUI should enable the application to be largely be controlled by a mouse.
Web UI
Does the tagger provide a Web UI for controlling the application. This is not only useful for headless servers such as nas servers that do not have a monitor directly attached, it also allows the tagger on a PC, Mac or Desktop Linux server to be controlled from another device such as an iPad or smartphone.
Command Line UI
Does the tagger provide a Command Line UI for controlling the application. This is not only useful for headless servers such as nas servers that do not have a monitor directly attached, it also allows the application to be controlled as part of an automated script.
Dark Mode
Does the tagger provide a Dark Mode look as well as the regular Light Mode
Single Album MusicBrainz Matching
Can a selection of files or folder representing an album be automatically matched to a MusicBrainz album
Single Album Discogs Matching
Can a selection of files or folder representing an album be automatically matched to a Discogs album
Match Album by Specified MusicBrainz Album
Can user specify the exact MusicBrainz release to match the folder to.
Match Album by Specified Discogs Album
Can user specify the exact Discogs release to match the folder to.
Automatic Multi Album Matching
Can the tagger match multiple albums in one go instead of having to match one album at a time, and does it group and match the songs as an album rather than just processing each song independently which can result in songs from one album being split into multiple albums.
Batch Automatch Large Libraries
Can multi album matching be done on a library of 10,000 songs in one go without crashing or freezing
Acoustid Fingerprint based matching
Does the tagger support Acoustid so it can at least fingerprint the song and at least identify the song.
Combined Acoustid Fingerprinting with Album Matching
Does the tagger support acoustid fingerprinting to allow songs without metadata to be identified and is this done in conjunction with album matching to ensure we match the correct album not just the correct song rather than just processing each song independently which can result in songs from one album being split into multiple albums.
Albunack Disc Id based matching
Does tagger support Albunack Disc Id matching, this is like cdtoc matching based on CD sectors but can be done on a folder of audio files without needing the CD itself.
Metadata from AcoustId
Can tagger make use of the user metadata added directly to AcoustId itself.
Metadata from AcoustId Albums
The AcoustId database is much larger than the MusicBrainz database, can tagger construct AcoustId album matches based on the AcoustId database.
Metadata from Naim Wav Metadata
Can tagger read the metadata files read by naim uniti for its wav files and add the data into the wav files themselves.
Max No of text Fields that can be autoadded
This counts the different fields that the tagger can update automatically from online sources such as MusicBrainz or Discogs based on the testing we have done. We only include fields that are known to SongKong, fields that are not supported by SongKong are not included.
Support for AcousticBrainz fields
AcousticBrainz can can analyse the actual music and work out the bpm and mood of a song, the database is keyed by MusicBrainz Id so if we have a song matched to the same MusicBrainz song then we can add this metadata from AcousticBrainz.
Automatic Classical Music Album Identification
We often need to treat classical music different to non-classical, in order to do this we need to be able to recognize if an album is classical or non-classical, can the tagger automatically do this for us.
Classical Music Support
Does the tagger have any special support for Classical Music such as special options for classical music like removing the composer from the album artist, and instead adding it the album title.
Genre options
Does the tagger support auto classification of our music by reading the genres from MusicBrainz or Discogs.
Identify HD Releases
Can the tagger automatically identify HD releases, i.e songs with a bitdepth of 24 or higher. This helps when we both hi-res and non-hi res versions of the same album and we would like to organize them based on this.
Custom Album Title Options
Does the tagger have options to add additional information to the album title such as the release type, this is useful for distinguishing between singles and albums with the same name.
Use Standard Artist name option
MusicBrainz is a proper relational database and because of this it can store both the standard name of each artist, and their artist name as it appears on each release. Does the tagger allow the user to choose between the standard artist name and the name as it appears on the album.
Featured Artist Special Handling
Within MusicBrainz sometimes featured artists are stored in the artist field but sometimes they are only stored in the title field, does the tagger provide options to control how they are stored in users music files
Featured Album Artist Special Handling
Within MusicBrainz sometimes featured artists are stored in the album artist field but sometimes they are only stored in the album field, does the tagger provide options to control how they are stored in users music files
Conversion of Artist names to Latin/English version
MusicBrainz is a proper relational database and because of this it can store both the original name of each artist, and version as written in different languages and scripts. Does the tagger have an option to convert non latin names to English versions of the name, e.g the russian composer Пётр Ильич Чайковский is better known outside Russia as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Use Standard Album name option
MusicBrainz is a proper relational database and because of this it can group different versions of the same album into release-groups. Sometimes there are slight differences in the album name within this release group. Does the tagger allow the user to choose between the album version name and the release group name.
Multi Disc Album Subtitle Handling
When album are multi-disc albums the individual discs sometimes have their own titles and sometimes they do not, does the tagger have options to control what to use in the Disc Subtitle field in these cases.
Delete Duplicates
Can the tagger identify duplicate songs based on acoustic fingerprints or metadata fields
Delete Duplicates
Can the tagger identify duplicate songs
Delete Duplicates by Metadata
Can the tagger identify duplicate songs based on metadata fields
Delete Duplicates by MusicBrainz
Can the tagger identify duplicate songs based on musicbrainz or acoustid ids
Basic File Renaming
Can the tagger rename files by creating a filename mask based on their selected metadata fields.
Scriptable File Renaming
Can the tagger use custom functions and use if logic to create advanced filename mask, for example can it organize albums so each are stored in a A-Z folder based on the first letter of the album artist.
File Rename Mask can be Saved
Can filename masks be saved so it is easy to swap between multiple rename masks
Simplify non-standard characters
Simplify multibyte or non ascii charcters where possibly for maximum compatbility, e.g replace é with e
Limit Path to 259 Windows Character Limit
Filenames longer than 259 characters cause problems for Windows Explorer, it is often useful to be able limit file path length to avoid issues with Windows system even if tagger itself is not being used on a Windows system
Move Additional Files on Rename
When moving files to a new directory is usually makes sense to also move associated non-music files such bookets or artwork.
Front Cover Artwork Lookup
Can the tagger automatically find front cover artwork.
Back Cover Lookup
Can the tagger automatically find back cover artwork
Artist Artwork Lookup
Can the tagger automatically find artist photos.
Artwork from Cover Art Archive
Can the tagger retrieve artwork form the Cover Art Archive, this is the primary archive used by MusciBrainz.
Artwork from fanart.tv
Can the tagger retrieve artwork form the FanArt.tv, this is good for artist artwork as well as album covers
Artwork from Discogs
Can the tagger automatically find artwork from Discogs
Auto Monitor Folder
Can the tagger automatically monitor a folder for new music files and process them as they are created.
Modifications Saved to Reports
Does the tagger log changes made by tasks in a report so user has a clear record of all changes the tagger has done. This is especially important when doing automated tagging so that the customer maintains full control of their tagging process.
Persistent Undo
Are all changes saved to internal database so they can be undone at later date even after restarting the tagger.
Manual Editing of fields
Does the tagger allow manual editing of metadata fields.
Spreadsheet Style Editing
Does the tagger allow editing of multiple fields in a spreadsheet style, for example can you copy a field and then paste into multiple other fields.
Scriptable Manual Editing
Does the tagger allow text changes to be made to multiple files in one go such as Capitalization or Find and Replace.
Status Report
Can the tagger create a status report showing the current metadata in selected files
Spreadsheet Report
Can the song metadata be exported to a spreadsheet so can be used by other applications
Missing Songs Report
Can the tagger show when files are missing some songs from the matched albums
Apple Music Integration
Apple Music is the defacto music player on Apple macs, it maintains its own music index so when the tagger modifies files can it inform Apple Music of the files it has modified to keep Apple Music synchronized.
Roon Integration
Roon is powerful music server software, it is a popular alternative to uPnp music servers. Does the tagger have any support for Roon custom metadata fields such as Personnel or AlbumTag
MinimServer Integration
MinimServer is a powerful and popular uPnP Server, does the tagger offer any support for unique MinimServer fields (such as Group) or does it allow the automatic update of MinimServer indexes from the tagger.
Regular Code Updates
Is the application updated at least twice a year. Regular updates are usually required just to keep upto date with platform changes and api chnages of any third party services, hopefully the application is continually improved with more significant updates as well.
Major Code Updates
Is the application continually updated with new features and improvements not just bug fixes.
User Forum
Support via a user forum allows customers to discuss issues and share ideas, it encourages the developer to respond in a timely manner.
Public Bug Tracker
All applications have bugs, a public bug tracker makes it much easier for customers to know and check progress of bugs. It can also give them information on future improvements and new features as well .