I am a refugee from TuneUp, so am trying to reconcile a Gracenote world with a Musicbrainz one.
Recently, I used Jaikoz to clean up my rather extensive music collection - most of which I have the provenance for, since most of the music I have came from CDs. The results were…lackluster.
Some of the problem stems from Musicbrainz data - but there is functionality I can’t seem to figure out in Jaikoz. the bottom line is that the music files are being tagged incorrectly, and badly incorrect at that. In order to narrow down the root cause, I focused on a specific artist - the Beatles - because I know every CD I have, and know every song file I ripped from those CDs were done before the iTunes music store existed and the only digitized files I had access to was the Parlophone albums, Past Masters 1 and 2, 1 and maybe the first Anthology. the Capitol catalog didn’t exist yet, and I am pretty sure all the singles/EPs/etc were either privately digitized or bootlegs.
Jaikoz made a hash of my Beatles catalog. It broke apart albums. Assigned songs to singles that I never owned. I had songs attached to “The U.S. Albums” when they should have been applied to Beatles For Sale, or another Parlophone release. I have a song identified as a “DVD medley” when it’s just “Help!” I have Let It Be labeled as a documentary. I have songs labeled as Bootleg recordings when I have never acquired a bootleg, and the song itself was part of one of the Anthology albums.
Now, I know much of this is on the database, but what TuneUp was able to do is review all the songs in the selection, and prioritize making an album first, even if it made duplicates, before reaching for more esoteric selections. I can’t seem to make Jaikoz do anything similar to this.
I’ve also noticed that Jaikoz takes the first selection as far a genre tagging, even after I confirmed in Musicbrainz that there are higher rated (more accurate) genres.
The end result is that, one I passed my 50,000+ songs through Jaikoz, I ended up with a ton of bad genres and songs incorrectly assigned.
I’m not sure if SongKong is better or if I am just not setting up Jaikoz correctly, or if it’s really just bad data. Granted, I’m a bit spoiled, because TuneUp really did do a good job matching songs to the albums I knew I had, but much of that may have been due to what Gracenote has in place.
The problem is, I can’t see any way to make Jaikoz prefer an album, or keep to standard genres. No matter what I set in the preferences, it doesn’t seem to do much more than grab the first set of data Musicbrainz presents. The result is I’m now manually going through my entire music catalog and repairing the bad genres, mismatched albums and misidentified songs.
Any insights into how to improve Jaikoz’s tagging would be greatly appreciated.