Does Jaikoz use a db backend like sqllite or berkleydb. It seems like to me it would be more efficient and faster to keep the info in a db so it could be more easily backed up and restored with less file I/O. The synchronization with the files could be done in the background when idle or when manually requested. Somebody school me if this isn’t a good idea, just wondering (as a programmer myself) if this is done (doesn’t seem like it) and if not, why not?
backend of Jaikoz
No it doesnt - at the moment. The original idea behind Jaikoz was
Get some new music files
Load them in to Jaikoz and make the corrections
Possibly move or load into your Media Player which now plays files correctly.
But many people are using it as follows:
Load all music files into Jaikoz and change some
Play in media player
Load all music files into Jaikoz and change some
Play in media player
…and repeat
This way of working requires a lot more memory, so I am now looking at some kind of database to speed up loading of files that have previously been loaded, and to reduce the memory required when all files loaded. But Jaikoz will still remian a tagger rather than a media player and there are a number of problems with this approach.
- Because Jaikoz allows you to list all your files in one list ,and scroll and sort I dont know if it will be too slow if it has to get files from a database rather than from memory.
- Problems with timestamping and moving files can cause all sorts of problems with editing files.
- Jaikoz has always been very transparent about what it does whereas Media Centres with library tend to be more opaque. Sometimes they store the data in the file and sometimes in the library and it is very easy for things to get messed up
- I would’nt want aysnchronous saving because saving changes to a fle is never guaranteed and as a user I want to know when/if my chnages have completed. I tried Jrivermedia Centre and was suprised to find that when iI ran Analyse Audio it saved the chnages to the file without even asking me, I wouldn’t want this kind of thing in jaikoz.
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Yes, you are so correct on that. I guess I want to eat my cake as well. I want the advantages of a database but not the disadvantages you mentioned. I tried a trial version of Helium Music Manager and I hated it because I never knew what was the authoritative record, the database or the files and I was always confused about what was happening to the files and when it was happening.
The nightmare scenario for me is getting really used to how a tool works, depending on it and then for some reason needing to use something else only to find that my changes were all in a proprietary database used by the software and none of my files are properly tagged.
The main reason I didn’t like Helium was as you said there was no transparency. I was also trying Media Monkey at the time, when I opened, with Media Monkey, the same group of files I had been working with in Helium none of my recent changes were present. When I re-performed the changes in MM those changes were not available in Helium. I swore off both of those managers at that point.
As for asynchronous saving, I don’t like how J.River saves replay gain and BPM to the file without asking but it gets worse. I have had to completely disable J.River’s writing to my files because it writes ISO-something and not UTF-8, and this is not even configurable. It writes ID3v-something even to flac files, and you can’t tell it to only populate fields that don’t already have values.
I’d expect more from a Media Center software vendor, having said that, I haven’t found anything better yet considering I only need it for an organizer/player. I don’t really need it to do tagging except for maybe replaygain and BPM (or some other calculated field).
-Mark