Best practise to fix genre and artwork?

[Sailor]

I have run my music library through Jaikoz and loaded all files into iTunes. (I don’t let iTunes to manage files, but I have my own directory structure) I have about 55k files in MP3. (and many more in FLAC outside iTunes)

I know that the tags are not perfect, but they are pretty good.

I have following problems with my files:

• some artwork is missing
• genres are not correct
• some files are misplaced
• some artists are wrong
• etc

I have some time available to continue fixing the tags, so I was wondering what to do next. What irritates me and my family most are sometimes missing artwork and wrong genres. So,

What is the best approach to fix genres?
What is the best approach to fix artwork?

I just don’t want to start loading large number of files into Jaikoz and run remote/manual corrections again.

Can I somehow use information available in iTunes to speed up the process? Could I use intelligent playlists to identify files with errors? If I export the library details to xml file, can I use this somehow with Jaikoz?

I have used MediaMonkey in the past, which was very useful in determining what to fix next in Jaikoz. It was all manual work, and too time consuming. I have now moved to Mac, and MM is not available.

I have used iTunes to identify album artists related errors. I collected all songs that had errors to playlists, and loaded these to Jaikoz.

I could perhaps do the same to genres. Change the iTunes view to genres, and collect the clear errors to playlist and load them to Jaikoz and fix. But this fixes only part of the problem.

I was wondering if I could use the export to excel functionality in Jaikoz. I would load large number of files into Jaikoz, and export the tags to Excel. Then I would fix them offline in Excel over a few weeks, and load again to Jaikoz. Would this work? I noticed that artwork and multiple values in field would not work - but otherwise?

Any best practises? Advise? Suggestions?

[paultaylor]

What is the best approach to fix genres?

In Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format 2 and Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs there are of options letting you tailor how the genre field is populated, but its very subjective what a ‘wrong’ genre is.

Then use Update Metadata from Musicbrainz and Update Metadata from Discogs to update fields with the genre info you require after changing the genre options. Of course other meta fields will be updated to if they have changed on Musicbrainz, but the song you have matched to in Musicbrainz will not change. You could also disable changing of any other fields using the Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format and Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format 2 options per field.

What is the best approach to fix artwork?

Discogs is the best source of good artwork, much better than Musicbrainz/Amazon. If you tagged these files with Jaikoz a while ago they would only grab artwork from Discogs if there was a direct link from Musicbrainz to Discogs. But in later releases there is now a separate Correct from Discogs task that searches for matches between yor songs and Discogs, so if you run this it is likely you’ll get some more matches and some additional data from Discogs including artwork. (The way the options are setup is if you have already matched the song to Musicbrainz then Discogs will only fill in blank fields it wil not overwrite your Musicbrainz data)

Can I somehow use information available in iTunes to speed up the process? Could I use intelligent playlists to identify files with errors? If I export the library details to xml file, can I use this somehow with Jaikoz?

In iTunes now you can export playlists to .m3u format rather than .xml, these can be loaded into Jaikoz.

I was wondering if I could use the export to excel functionality in Jaikoz. I would load large number of files into Jaikoz, and export the tags to Excel. Then I would fix them offline in Excel over a few weeks, and load again to Jaikoz. Would this work? I noticed that artwork and multiple values in field would not work - but otherwise?

Yes that would work, but the fixing itself would still be manual and hence time consuming.