SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Artwork and MusicBrainz and a few other things

#1

Ok, I have way too much free time!

I’ve successfully tagged 99% of my 3,500 - 4,000 Albums. They were all in ALAC format which is important later on. I used Jaikoz to tag my albums using the ALAC files not the original CDs which I crated and stored away after I ripped the lossless files.

During the ripping process I made high quality scans of the album (CD) cover artwork and most of the liner notes where it was practical. I’m currently in the process of cleaning up, color correcting, cropping and uploading the art to MusicBrainz. I’m uploading at a resolution of 2,000 x 2,000 pixels because I figured that is more than enough. Some of the art might vary a bit in one dimension or the other if the art isn’t exactly square, but in most cases, the two dimensions are similar.

Question 1) How long after I upload album art up to MusicBrainz will the art be accessible to Jaikoz?

To ask the next question, let me provide some background…

Most of the thousands of “albums” in my collection are jazz standards or blues. My favorite era of jazz is from the late 40s through the 60s. Therefore, many hundreds of my CDs were originally on vinyl. In most cases the same tracks that were on the vinyl are identical to the tracks on the CDs.

My workflow was to drag the folder containing one album onto Jaikoz, let it ID the album, click on the icon to submit the acoustic ID, remotely add the release to my MusicBrainz collection and then save the info to the files when they are closed.

So now I have 4,100 or so releases in my MusicBrainz collection. Looking through the many pages of my collection, I noticed that many of my releases are listed as media type “vinyl.” I do not own ANY vinyl! I understand that by default Jaikoz matches to the oldest release which for many hundreds of my digital collection are going to be the original vinyl releases. I have no problem with Jaikoz doing this as I think CDs are dying and in another decade or so admitting you owned a CD will be as shameful as admitting you onced owned 8-track tapes!

Now my question! For my high-quality scans of album art that is identical to the original cardboard albums which release should I upload it to? I know technically, I should upload it to the CD release of the vinyl, BUT that CD is just one instance of the release. Some of these great 50s and 60s classics of Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, et. al. have been released and re-released many times, by different countries and in many cases within the same country.

  1. does it make more sense to upload my lovingly scanned, high quality album art to the vinyl release as it looks like that would make the artwork available to more users as programs like Jaikoz tend to match even digital releases of the album to the original vinyl release?

Comments?
Thanks!

#2

If the artwork and track list is the same for both the cd and the vinyl, I will typically upload it to both locations. If there are multiple CD releases that all have the same artwork, I will typically just upload it to the most common release. These typically are either US, or the country of origin of the artist.

I usually only bother when artwork is missing or really poor quality or low res / size. I a also a little crazy and will typically go in and make minor tweaks to my images to make them perfectly square. I think it looks better in a lot of programs, but some purest think it ruins the artwork.

I believe there is some type of approval process on changes in musicbrainz so it could take up to 3 weeks. Last I heard, jaikoz also used it’s own servers, so there may be a slight delay, depending on how often Paul synchs it with their data.

When I tag my music, I will typically tag it using the earliest date that has the same track listing. I like to have my 50’s jazz show up as being released in the 50’s and not in the 80’s :wink: