MonkeyMatch will find and help you fix names with similar spellings. It will search the MediaMonkey database for the selected category - Artists & Album Artists, Albums or Song Titles - and do a fuzzy compare of each one to all other such names in the MediaMonkey database. When similar names are found they will be listed allowing you to quickly and easily choose the correct spelling. It will then modify all songs that had the incorrect spelling, setting the applicable field to the correct spelling you chose.
The accuracy of the fuzzy search is selectable, with 4 presets and 1 that can be fully customized. The search is highly optimized, but can still be slow with large databases, so filters can be set to limit which names that will be compared.
The correction process is designed to be very fast, requiring only 2 clicks to correct a name. A right-click menu allows you to edit a name, look up more info about the selected name, and more.
MonkeyMatch is written in C# as a separate application, not an addon.
Current Version: 0.5.56 - July 7, 2013
Download Here
Help File (PDF)
Getting Started Tutorial
The following is a quick and simple tutorial to get you started. It's quite simple, but there are a couple steps which aren't intuitive at all.
Finding Matches
Install MonkeyMatch, and start it. The main screen will appear.
For now, concentrate on the top left corner of the screen. The Filters and other buttons will be explained later in this document.
When started, MonkeyMatch will have Artists as the selected Category, and the Match Accuracy will be set to 5, Extremely Accurate. This is a good starting point for now, so click on the Find Matches button.
MonkeyMatch will search the MediaMonkey database, getting all unique Artist and Album Artist names. (When Albums or Songs are selected, MonkeyMatch only gets the Album names or Song Titles, respectively.)
You will see the counters increasing for SubSet Names and then SuperSet Names (more on these later). Once it has both sets of names, MonkeyMatch will start comparing the two lists, doing a fuzzy search looking for similar names. Whenever it finds a pair of similar names it will increase the Match Pairs counter.
Matches Found
When it's done finding matches, it will load the first group of matches into the Match Group window, and the Next Match Group button will become enabled.
From this screen you can see that my database has 2,987 unique Artist and Album Artist names. After comparing all of them, it found 63 pairs of names that were considered to be matches according to the current accuracy setting. The first pair of matches is displayed, leaving 62 pairs left.
Correcting Matches
The first pair of matches is displayed in the Match Group window in that large New Courier font. (The font can be changed if you prefer something else.)
According to their web site, Alice In Chains should have the "I" capitalized for the word "In", meaning the bottom name is the correct one. Click on the Preferred button to indicate this choice. The background of the selected name will turn green.
To correct the top spelling, simply double-click on the name. The name will be copied from the Preferred entry and the text will change to a bold red font, indicating that it has changed. The Save Changes button will become enabled, indicating that a change has been made and needs to be saved to the MediaMonkey database.
Save Changes
Clicking the Save Changes button will update the MediaMonkey database. It will search for all songs that have the Artist or Album Artist set to the incorrect spelling and will change each of them to have the correct spelling. When the selected Category is Artists, MonkeyMatch will search both the Artist and Album Artist fields, but will correct each individually. If either field contains the incorrect spelling it will be replaced by the correct one.
Once the change is saved, the changed name will be removed from the list. If a single name remains in the list, then no more edits are possible so the next group of matches will be displayed.
Next Match Group
This button will clear the Match Group window, get the next group of matches and display them, and decrement the Matches Left counter. If there any changes that have not been saved, a warning box will pop up before the next group is displayed.
Right-Click Menu
Right-click on a name to list a few options.
More Info will list all the songs associated with the selected name. More Info (All) - or F11 - will list the songs associated will all the names shown. Warning - these can take a few seconds if there are many songs to be shown.
Google Search will launch Google with the listed name as the search string.
Edit will pop up a box letting you free-edit that name.
Revert To Original will undo all changes made to the name.
Blacklist All Pairs - or F12 - will add all possible combinations of the listed names to a list of names that are known to be unique. These pairs will never again be considered to be a match. Note that each name may still match some other name, but the combination of the two names will never match again. For example, if you blacklist Rush and Bush, you will never see those two names paired together. But if you ever add a band called Mush then you will see Rush matching Mush, and Bush matching Mush.
Copy and Paste work with the Windows Clipboard, just like in any other program.
Tutorial Complete
That's it. OK, there's more that can be done, and there's a LOT more information about what's MonkeyMatch is actually doing. But that will get you started.
Change History
Beta 0.5.30 - June 11, 2013
Fixed a bug that causes an "Index Out Of Range" error
Beta 0.5.34 - June 15, 2013
Added Blacklisting Support
Added Function Keys:
--- F11 - More Info On All
--- F12 - Blacklist All Pairs
Added Composer to all Artist and AlbumArtist searches
Added Match Progress counter to show number of SubSet names checked
Small performance increase gained by only showing counters in hundreds
Beta 0.5.49 - June 30, 2013
Fixed a bug caused by a song without Artist, Album, and Song Title fields.
Beta 0.5.53 - July 4, 2013
Fixed a bug caused by extremely long names
Added a counter to show how many songs have been changed
Changed the way that changed songs are saved and updated by MediaMonkey
Added an option to stop matching once a certain number of Match Pairs have been found
Clicking Help in the Configure menu now works
When all Match Pairs have been processed, the Match Pair list disappears
Made some minor tweaks and stability improvements, and added some more debugging capabilities
Beta 0.5.56 - July 7, 2013
TREMENDOUS performance improvement - even more so if you use Blacklisting. Simply huge.
Changed "Revert To Original" to "Undo All Changes" because the latter is more standard
