First of all I will say that I have used a wide variety of tagging programs, and so far Jaikoz is the best solution I have found, easily worth the price of a full license. The integration of Musicbrainz and MusicIP with local autocorrection algorithms and duplicate detection is seamless and powerful. Common actions are available in the toolbar, the menu system is fairly straightforward, and there are plenty of options to tweak in the preferences to get it customized to your liking. My previous choice of taggers was MP3Tag for manual changes coupled with MusicBrainz for autoverification, in addition I have tried many other manual taggers and automated solutions such as TuneUp, FixTune and TagRunner. Although I will continue to keep MP3Tag around, I have been less than impressed so far with MusicBrainz’s switch from the classic tagger to Picard, and am considering dropping that program altogether after finding Jaikoz.
The basic process I have been using is simple enough: first import your files, then run the AutoCorrector (which goes through a multi-stage process of normalizing filenames and best guesses using local algorithms, generating music ID fingerprints for MusicIP and MusicBrainz, and getting artwork automatically from various services). I have found it best to import in 10,000 song chunks per session, more on this later. I then run the “delete duplicates” feature, which does a great job of finding duplicate files across different songs. Then comes the process of manually verifying the changes that have been made, which is made fairly straightforward in the editor window with different colors highlighting changes, missing fields, and files which are marked for deletion. Various actions are available by right clicking on a song entry, such as viewing an album’s complete information on MusicBrainz, manually selecting matches from a list of suggestions,and transferring information from a filename to a tag or vice versa. You can sort by any column field, and compare the new changes to the old version by selecting “Show View Pane” from the View menu. If you only want to see some songs, bring up the filters menu and select your choice. Copy and paste, as well as drag and drop (although somewhat buggy to me), is supported in all fields, making it easy to add artwork to all songs in a album if not automatically done for you. If you make any terrible mistakes, there is an undo button (last action only it seems) as well as the option to revert to your saved version. After you are completely satisfied with the results, simply select the “Save Changes” button and only then will the actual tag information be written out. Also present, although not turned on by default, is the option to rewrite the underlying filenames in whatever format you prefer. Additional niceties include the ability to update your changes to iTunes in a few different ways, which would be really nice if I ever decide to switch back from foobar on my Windows machine (doubtful!).
One complaint I have found common to many of these programs is that when importing a large library, they can crash or run out of memory. Jaikoz is no different in this respect, however you can increase the default memory allocation easily from the startup script (http://www.jthink.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/776.page I increased to 1024 aka 1GB), which has alleviated some of my problems when importing a lot of files at once. The import and recognition phases can be take a long time, but this is to be expected when dealing with such a large amount of data and processing. The application is fairly robust and my computer remains responsive during these processes, although it is probably best to let them run overnight or at a time when you don’t need to carry out important tasks. I do wish the process for retrieving album artwork was a bit less opaque, as I cannot find a way to search or import images in any way other than through the auto-corrector or a local file. All in all though, a great program and I look forward to continued improvements.