Jaikoz- Discussion Forum

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Search/Fetch Album Artwork for every song based on its Album, Year and sometimes Title and present the user with the images to select from.

paultaylor wrote:

Its not really the philosophy of Jaikoz to require users to make choices like this, but I expect I will have to add this for those difficult albums.

After hours of looking around on the internet, I came across "Album Art Downloader". This is a fantastic piece of software and it automated some of my manual clicks when use Google images for Artwork. Unfortunately, AAD is Windows only so I had to use Jaikoz, AAD and a browser for doing IMDB searches all from within a VirtualBox virtual machine. It would be nice if we could have some similar functionality built-into Jaikoz. That would certainly make it one of the TOP tagging tools considering that very few to none have this functionality built-in and integrated.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Custom filters: The built-in filters are good, but sometimes I just need to view only a subset of the collection that has or does not have certain text/pattern in one or many tags.

Of course you can use the search box on the right handside to limit results to those with matching value in album/artist or title. But I can see that extending this to other fields and to allow reguar expressions would be useful.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Worklist: Sometimes I just don't want to work on the entire (Hindi, English, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, etc) collection but on just one of them. Currently, I have to manually work on Hindi. Close all the files, re-add English ... It would be nice if we could create Smart Worklists/Playlists by certain criteria, like folder name has Hindi or English or some pattern in it then add to the Hindi / Engligh smart playlist.

paultaylor wrote:

Jaikoz can open playlists, but its not a playlist creator. But you could use the Tag Browser to filter results by genre for example.

Genres cannot be used for what I am looking. I am using the Grouping tag to group all Hindi, English, Arabic, etc music. But, even that is manual and is not SMART. People don't typically mix these different groups of songs in one folder and would have different folders for them. My request is not for playlists but, WORK LISTs. So, I don't have to close and open different groups of files and NO I certainly don't want to use a static iTunes playlist for this considering that the song files, location may change over the course of tag editing.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* File/Folder/Tag fill/renaming: It would be nice to see live examples of the user defined masks. Also, EasyTag in Linux allows me to pick up the Album year from the folder that contains the music file.

paultaylor wrote:

What do you mean, just an example or a way to preview any file because running it ?

* In "File And Folder Correct", the shipped masks will be updated by the user sometimes accidentally and may mess up the Actions. There should be some 'Reset to default' for such fields all throughout the application (a la Microsoft).

* In "Correct Metadata From Filename", Linux EasyTag will take the following file:
/home/sandeepk/Music/Hindi/Some Movie (2010)/Some Movie - Some Title.mp3 and fill the Album, Title and Year tags with the following mask.
%a (%y)/%a - %t . No matter how I write my masks, it will show me the mask in action using the selected file. Once, I am confident with one and my music collection has been stored in more or less the same format, I can run the "Fill tags" action over the entire collection.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Manual update from remote should show the Integer number of files or even 'All' when using the slider setting.

paultaylor wrote:

Sorry, I dont understand this one.

Preferences -> MusicBrainz->Manualmatch slider does not tell you exactly how many songs are configured to be reviewed. Also, that same integer feedback field can read "All" if taken all the way to the end.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Allow Sorting and even a filter for all the files that have been updated/modified/changed. Currently, they are all over the place in a large collection and one cannot get a sense of just how many files got updated. MusicIP Mixer will show you a new Window with all that it proposes to be changed and the user can select/deselect from this list.

Yes, you can sort by status, but not filter at the moment that is a good idea.

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Selection count: The status bar should show the count of currently selected objects (rows/fields)

Yes, might make things more user-friendly

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Vocal Artist: There should be a way to pull down the "Vocals performed by" information in some tag for the user to decide later if he wants to use it in the Artist or any other field.

paultaylor wrote:

Yes, this could be added.

After finally cleaning up Hindi music collection and painfully & manually adding Artwork to all the songs, I imported this into Mac iTunes to enjoy the cover flow view. I realized that some songs from the same Album/Movie would show up individually and not grouped under one Album/Movie Cover Art. Researching around, people seem to suggest the use of "Is part of compilation" tag on such tracks. After doing that manually for couple of Albums/Tracks, I am thinking can I not just use Jaikoz to set *ALL* my music collection tracks to be part of compilation (checkbox checked)? Is there anything else that iTunes must be doing in the background to other tags other than setting this to true??

sandeepkhanna wrote:

* Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)

The View/Show View Pane option splits the screen and shows the files as they are currently saved, with the modified fields highlighted for easy comparison.

*** NEW IN THIS POST ***
* When using "manual correct metadata from MusicBrainz" or even automatic remote correct for that matter, sometimes we just want to update a few tags and not be forced to take all the tag data as part of the row selection (radio button). It would be nice to also have a checkbox on the columns (representing the tags) to only update some of the tags from the remote database.

* Also, the music importing dialog box shows "songs being loaded so far" in increments of 100 and gives a very poor performance perception to the end user. Please show it either in the status bar as some of the Linux tools do or even as a dialog with a live count and song file/title "being processed" just like iTunes.

* The top right corner search box is very rudimentary. It should show live results as the user is typing. It does not search very well with spaces in the search terms. For example: "Airbase Presents Moon" will not just return that but other results containing just "Airbase", "Presents" and "Moon". Also, highlighting parts of tag text that was found (like google) would be fantastic.

* File/folder monitor/watch functionality would be great as well and would complement the smart Worklist feature.

Over the last couple of years, I have used a lot of mp3 tagging softwares in Linux, Windows and Mac. And, finally did settle down with Jaikoz. It is indeed unique in the way it presents the music files/data and the User Interface can certainly use a facelift.

What I realized is that the MusicBrainz & AmpliFind services don't necessarily always have the most accurate or even any data and we need to manually search the internet and make mass & fast edits. One such area is the Album Artwork. None of the tagging tools I have tried till date does a good job. Although, I found TuneUP's approach to be interesting where it will scourge the internet (Amazon, Google images and other sources) and present a few image options for the song and lets the user pick the right one. I have painfully done this manually using Jaikoz and Google images by using the Album name and year and sometimes have had to use the Title.

Being a long time power user of mp3 tagging tools, I suggest the following features for Jaikoz:
* Search/Fetch Album Artwork for every song based on its Album, Year and sometimes Title and present the user with the images to select from.

* Custom filters: The built-in filters are good, but sometimes I just need to view only a subset of the collection that has or does not have certain text/pattern in one or many tags.

* Worklist: Sometimes I just don't want to work on the entire (Hindi, English, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, etc) collection but on just one of them. Currently, I have to manually work on Hindi. Close all the files, re-add English ... It would be nice if we could create Smart Worklists/Playlists by certain criteria, like folder name has Hindi or English or some pattern in it then add to the Hindi / Engligh smart playlist.

* File/Folder/Tag fill/renaming: It would be nice to see live examples of the user defined masks. Also, EasyTag in Linux allows me to pick up the Album year from the folder that contains the music file.

* Manual update from remote should show the Integer number of files or even 'All' when using the slider setting.

* Allow Sorting and even a filter for all the files that have been updated/modified/changed. Currently, they are all over the place in a large collection and one cannot get a sense of just how many files got updated. MusicIP Mixer will show you a new Window with all that it proposes to be changed and the user can select/deselect from this list.

* Selection count: The status bar should show the count of currently selected objects (rows/fields)

* Vocal Artist: There should be a way to pull down the "Vocals performed by" information in some tag for the user to decide later if he wants to use it in the Artist or any other field.

* Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)

Just purchased the Full license and have been succesfully doing Mass updates and saves so far ...

There is also the "Album Artist" tag/field that is seemed to be used a lot by Banshee in Linux. Doesn't this field make more sense as the "Album's artist" being the individual/group or even "various artists". And, let populate the Artist field with the "Vocals performed by" values from MusicBrainz.

When performing the Action->Retrieve Acoustic IDs in Jaikoz ... it rather goes very very fast (as seen in the console) compared to MusicIP Mixer which takes a few seconds (3-4) before populating the PUID fields. Do I need to purchase and install the Full license before my copy of Jaikoz can truly generate & use the PUIDs?

Also, once the deep analysis (PUID lookup) was complete, I can select all tracks, right click and "Archive Analysis (modifies file)", which saves the PUID data.

There is also a "Fix tags" option in MusicIP Mixer which seems to use the MusicIP database or is it using MusicBrainz behind the scenes.

What bothers me is, that once archived the analysis (saved PUIDs) in the mp3s and reopened those in Jaikoz, Jaikoz doesn't show some as having the PUIDs! This happens only for a subset (1000s though). I also confirmed in MusicIP Mixer by re-reading the songs from disk, that they retained their PUIDs.

Currently evaluating Jaikoz ...

What is the best sequence of actions to cleanup/scrub a large music collection?

After years of efforts doing manual, mass tagging from file/folder names and more recently learning about AmpliFIND/MusicBrainz signatures ... I decided to proceed as follows:

1) Use MusicIP Mixer to deep analyse every track and possibly fetch and update tracks with AmpliFIND PUID. I am assuming the the PUIDs fetched will be saved in the tracks after lookup.
2) Identify & Eliminate duplicates using MusicIP Mixer
3) Use Jaikoz to do a mass lookup & update tracks with MusicBrainz IDs based on AmpliFIND PUIDs. Also, perform other tag/file/folder adjustments as needed since Jaikoz seems to have a lot of flexibility with this.
4) Use a TuneUP iTunes companion (on Mac/Windows) OR Banshee/SongBird (Linux) to lookup and associate CoverArt with Albums. TuneUP actually gives multiple choices of artwork per track which are retrieved from various sources on the internet (Amazon, Google images, etc).

Is the above a sensible approach ? Also, can Jaikoz on Linux (Mandriva 2010.0 AMD x86_64 with Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM build 1.6.0_16-b01) perform STEP (1) instead of me having to do the deep track analysis using MusicIP Mixer on Windows?

Spending 10 years in trying to cleanup and manage my mp3 collection ... I have tried all sorts of tools on Linux, Windows, Mac. Fairly, recently started evaluating the music fingerprinting and identification with MusicIP and MusicBrainz ... I am evaulating Jaikoz after getting frustrated with other ones.

Most of the tools including Jaikoz do a poor job at:
1) Looking up the right Artist (this is not always the music composer/director !!)
2) Looking up Album Art from everywhere (Google, Amazon, anywhere, everywhere ... its 21st century and this data is all over the web .. just fetch and let the user decide which one to keep ... TuneUp kinda does that)

Example:
Most Indian music is sung in duets or even has multiple artists. I noticed that the MusicBrainz site has the correct info in the "Vocals performed by" section, but sadly every other Tag editor including Jaikoz uses the Music composer as the song/track Artist!

Track details from Musicbrainz
http://musicbrainz.org/track/647e0d75-0e59-401d-a6c0-a21f01e29066.html

Same track from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Dil-To-Pagal-Hai/dp/B001CXR4U8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1270391746&sr=1-1

I would expect the Artist to be the entries from "Vocals performed by" .. for this track and not from the MusicBrainz Artist section.

Is it just me that is interpreting or mis-interpreting the meaning of 'Artist'. The fact that I am willing to painstakingly work at and clean my music collection is that I want to be able to search by and listen to songs by certain singers/artists and even have a pretty view of my collection (Album Art)

Any suggestions?

I am a Linux user and have come very close to selecting Jaikoz but would like to learn more about its flexibility, adaptibility to my needs before I go with it.[b][u]