SongKong vs Metadatics 1.6.11

This articles compares SongKong with the Metadatics music tagger. You can see a more in-depth standalone review of Metadatics here.

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Select here for a table comparing SongKong with a number of different taggers

Metadatics 1.6.11

Metadatics is a MacOS only tag editor.

User Interface

Metadatics is a GUI application written natively for MacOS, and it is laid out cleanly and logically. First impressions are that it is similar to a Mac version of the windows tag editor Mp3tag

Song Identification

Metadatics has a simple MusicBrainz search tool that allow us to search for albums by artist and album name then associate the tracks of the selected album with selected files. It works but you need to know what album you are looking for and search is rather slow and this means the MusicBrainz lookup can only be done for known albums one at a time manually

There is also an Artwork search

There is not support for Discogs or Acoustid

Manual Editing

Editing works a bit like Mp3tag or Jaikoz, we can edit fields inline in the spreadsheet section or in the Edit tabs that show the current values for the selected songs. There are the usual copy, paste and autofill options plus more complex text manipulation options such as converting case or removing text from the beginning or end of fields.

Rename Files

Metadatics has a very simple rename function that lets us rename or copy files based on the standard fields (e.g Title, Track Number) but does not let you define any functions or do anything more complex then that.

Delete Duplicates

Metadatics does not seem to have a Delete Duplicates task

Interoperability

Metadatics has no special support for integration with other applications

Support

Metadatics has no user forum or public bug tracker, only email support.

Summary

Metadatics is a simple but well executed tag editor that is great for manual editing of your metadata, and has a simple file renaming function. It also has a simple MusicBrainz lookup that works fine for looking up the occasional album, and an Artwork lookup for finding front covers.

SongKong 11.0

SongKong is an advanced software applications with a wealth of advanced features, to summarize:

  • Can automatch libraries of any size
  • Automatically add upto 128 metadata fields to matched files
  • Also has Delete Duplicates, File Renamer, Monitor Watch Folder
  • Automatch from Discogs and AcoustId Albums as well
  • High quality cover art
  • Support for back covers and artist artwork as well
  • Support for Classical music
  • Also has a web interface so can be used on headless linux and nas devices
  • Detailed reporting kept for every task run
  • Continually improved and updated
  • Support for iTunes, Apple Music, Roon and MinimServer
  • Public community forum and bug tracker

Below we compare support for key features, if both applications have the feature the row is green, if only SongKong has the feature the row is red, if only Metadatics has feature the row is yellow, if neither have the feature the row is grey.

Feature SongKong 10.7 Metadatics 1.6.11
Platforms
MacOS
Windows
Linux Desktop
Linux Headless
Melco Digital Library
Docker
Qnap
Synology
User Interface
Standard Install
Intuitive Ease of Use
Desktop UI
Web UI
Command Line
Dark Mode
Song Matching
Single Album MusicBrainz Matching
Single Album Discogs Matching
Single Album Bandcamp 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
Metadata Formatting
Maximum no of different textual metadata Fields that can be auto-added 128 27
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
Delete Duplicates
Delete Duplicates task
Delete Duplicates by Metadata
Delete Duplicates by MusicBrainz Ids
Delete Duplicates by Discogs Ids
Delete Duplicates by AcoustIds
Advanced Deletion Criteria
Check duplicates within single audio format
Delete Empty Folders after Deletion
File Renaming
Basic 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
Artwork and Photography
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
Performance
Multiple Cpu Support
Unlimited no of Files processed
Audio Format Support
Flac
Aif
Wav
Dsf
Ogg
Mp3
M4a
Mp4
Wma
Automation
Auto Monitor Folder
Persistent Undo
Modifications Saved to Reports
Manual Editing
Manual Editing of fields
Artwork Lookup
Spreadsheet Style Editing
Automated Editing
Find and Replace
Multi Field Find and Replace
Capitalizer
Multi Field Capitalizer
Scriptable Editing
Reporting
Status Report
Spreadsheet Report
Missing Songs Report
Interoperability
iTunes Integration
Apple Music Integration
Roon Integration
MinimServer Integration
Support
Regular Code Updates
Major 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

Single Album Bandcamp Matching

Can a selection of files or folder representing an album be automatically matched to a Bandcamp 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.

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.

Delete Empty Folders

If files are moved causes the orginal directory to be empty it usually makes sense for the directory to be deleted.

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.

Find and Replace

Does the tagger allow to run a find and replace on a field to modify it in all selected files

Multi Field Find and Replace

Does the tagger allow to run a find and replace on multiple fields to modify them in all selected files in one go

Capitalizer

Does the tagger allow to run capitalization such as title case or lowercase on a field to modify it in all selected files

Multi Field Capitalizer

Does the tagger allow to run capitalization such as title case or lowercase on multiple fields to modify them in all selected files in one go

Scriptable Editing

Does the tagger allow text changes to be made to multiple files in one go with general puprose scripting language. These are usually quite powerful but also quite difficult for novice users to use.

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 .