SongKong 8.1 Scar released on 7th January 2022

We are pleased to announce the release of SongKong 8.1 Scar.

This is a major release that now has significant improvements to performer credits

Performer Credits

SongKong could already retrieve track level performer credits from MusicBrainz. But MusicBrainz can also store performer credits at release level and these apply to all tracks on the release, this new release can now retrieve these release level credits and add them to each track.

When a track has multiple credits for a particular role (such as two engineers) they are not stored by MusicBrainz in any particular order, so the order they were added to SongKong was random, this mean that the order could change when the the Albunack database was rebuilt. Now to ensure consistency and remove needless modification to your SongKong music files these roles are always stored in alphabetical order

SongKong correctly splits a single credit of multiple instruments into multiple credits, so a credit for Paul McCartney Vocals, Guitar is added to your music files as Paul McCartney (Vocals), Paul McCartney (Guitar), but it was also splitting single credits such John Lennon, Addtional Guitar incorrectly, this is now fixed.

The vocal performance of Vocal performers was previously being added to the Instruments field, this is not what most customers would like so now the instruments field is restricted to actual instruments

Original Release Date

When looking for the earliest or original release date SongKong was always selecting later release with country to earlier than one with unknown country. So this means it may not get the earliest release and it could actually be later than the release matched if song has been matched to a release with no country events, this is now fixed.

Improved Matching

When double checking album matches we now allow for existing data storing the featured artists in title rather than artist. This is quite common but MusicBrainz preferred formatting is for featured artists to be stored in artist credit so that when we double check artist/title for each match it was sometimes leading to valid matches being rejected.

So when matching we now check for artists in original metadata and strip out and when checking artist credits we should allow a match from name to just the one main name credit in artist credit.