Comments

[Anonymous]

Hi Paul.

Thanks for all the work you’ve put into Jaikoz - glad to see a OS X, Musicbrainz compatible tagger out there. That said, I have to say I find Jaikoz fairly confusing. I can certainly load a bunch of files and run the tagger, but then…

Please take this as constructive criticism (in no particular order)

1. Column Header “Unique File Id” - It took me a while looking around before I was sure this was simply the MusicBrainz ID (MBID). I would suggest renaming the header.
2. With my first set of mp3s, I looked at what was loaded and couldn’t figure out why some cells were blue, some green, and others not colored at all. Especially given that the manual is so thorough, it would be nice if you explained this somewhere (or made it easier to find, if I missed it).
3. MusicBrainz is, unfortunately, not perfect. One of the things I found VERY frustrating was the inability to quickly work around/through MB’s mistakes - in other words, unless I wanted to spend the time to correct ALL its mistakes at the moment, I found myself getting frustrated and simply closing Jaikoz without tagging anything. Two specific solutions to this:
   a) A toggle column so that users can (for example), run autotag, then “turn off” all the tags where they see mistakes, allowing them to then save everything that’s correct. They can then choose whether to manually fix the remaining tags, at that time or at some point in the future.
   b) Quite often the same artist/song pairing will appear on mutliple albums. It would be useful if users were given some options out from the MusicBrainz DB in such cases. Now Jaikoz will tell you that a song is from a live album (for example), and if you know it’s not, well, you’re out of luck.

There also seem to be problems with the save and rename functions. I have twice now seen Jaikoz tags that seem perfect in the edit window, save and close, and then gone to iTunes and found that the track name has also been written into the artist field. I also like to consistently name by files “track number track name.” Although I appear to be given the option to set this convention as default and save these settings, in practice I am finding that I need to reset this every time I open Jaikoz. Moreover, the function doesn’t seem to be working at all, and when tags ARE changed, the filenames remain the same.

All in all, I guess, the program doesn’t seem to be working very well at all, although it’s clearly doing things.

FYI, I am on Mac OS X 10.4 (PowerPC), etc.

Best regards.

[paultaylor]

1. Column Header “Unique File Id” - It took me a while looking around before I was sure this was simply the MusicBrainz ID (MBID). I would suggest renaming the header.

At the moment Jaikoz columns map directly onto ID3Tag frames, The Unique File Id frame can be used by otheridentifications systems other than MB so I cant rename it to MBID, but I can see this make its more difficult, it is more of a problem for all the other MB stuff that gets matched and held in the User Defined Info Column. When Jaikoz supports otther media formats the columns will become independent of the underlying ID3Tag frames.

2. With my first set of mp3s, I looked at what was loaded and couldn’t figure out why some cells were blue, some green, and others not colored at all. Especially given that the manual is so thorough, it would be nice if you explained this somewhere (or made it easier to find, if I missed it).

yes it is only mentioned very briefly, I should improve this.

3. MusicBrainz is, unfortunately, not perfect. One of the things I found VERY frustrating was the inability to quickly work around/through MB’s mistakes - in other words, unless I wanted to spend the time to correct ALL its mistakes at the moment, I found myself getting frustrated and simply closing Jaikoz without tagging anything. Two specific solutions to this:

Exactly, that is why in Jaikoz all changes are pending nothing is actually saved to the file unless you action it, and that is why there are powerful editing features to make manual editing as required. Also note that you can elect to save only selected records from the popup menu you dont have to save everything. I do need to add a undo facility in though.

a) A toggle column so that users can (for example), run autotag, then “turn off” all the tags where they see mistakes, allowing them to then save everything that’s correct. They can then choose whether to manually fix the remaining tags, at that time or at some point in the future.

They can elect which records to save, do you want to reset these tags or just mark them as ‘Not ready for save’. It is an interesting idea although Im not really sure how useful it would be.

b) Quite often the same artist/song pairing will appear on mutliple albums. It would be useful if users were given some options out from the MusicBrainz DB in such cases. Now Jaikoz will tell you that a song is from a live album (for example), and if you know it’s not, well, you’re out of luck.

A manual musicbrainz taggig option will be added. But of course this requires user interaction which stops you from tagging alot of files and leaving Jaikoz to get on with it.

There also seem to be problems with the save and rename functions. I have twice now seen Jaikoz tags that seem perfect in the edit window, save and close, and then gone to iTunes and found that the track name has also been written into the artist field.

Ive never seen this, you mention rename, renaming the actual file will cause problems if the item is laready in an ITunes libarary because Itunes maintains its own library. I would like to get to the bottom of this, does the file look ok outside of Itunes, what does it look like if loaded up into Jaikoz. Maybe you could send me the problem file.

[quote=Anonymous]
I also like to consistently name by files “track number track name.” Although I appear to be given the option to set this convention as default and save these settings, in practice I am finding that I need to reset this every time I open Jaikoz. Moreover, the function doesn’t seem to be working at all, and when tags ARE changed, the filenames

[Anonymous]

[quote=paultaylor][quote=Anonymous]
b) Quite often the same artist/song pairing will appear on mutliple albums. It would be useful if users were given some options out from the MusicBrainz DB in such cases. Now Jaikoz will tell you that a song is from a live album (for example), and if you know it’s not, well, you’re out of luck.
[/quote]
A manual musicbrainz taggig option will be added. But of course this requires user interaction which stops you from tagging alot of files and leaving Jaikoz to get on with it.
[/quote]
Maybe a concrete example will help: Jaikoz checks MB and then reports back that the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles is from “The Beatles Live At Hollywood Bowl.” You know very well that it’s not a live version of the song, and you also know that a popular song like that will appear on many different albums, both by the Beatles and multi-artist compilations. If you then have to open your browser and manually search the internet and/or MusicBrainz, then Jaikoz isn’t saving you any time, really - once you’ve found the information in that way, it’s just as easy to manually make the changes via iTunes (or WMP or whatever).

Alternately, let me ask you a question: The song “Rain in the Summertime” by the Alarm appears in the MB database at least 12 times. How does Jaikoz decide which of those to tag the file with if there’s no acoustic fingerprint? (Presumably song length, track number, etc.) I have no problem with it taking a “best guess,” but it would be nice if the user had easy access through Jaikoz to the other 11 options, if they’re not happy with that guess.

[paultaylor]

[quote=Anonymous]
Alternately, let me ask you a question: The song “Rain in the Summertime” by the Alarm appears in the MB database at least 12 times. How does Jaikoz decide which of those to tag the file with if there’s no acoustic fingerprint? (Presumably song length, track number, etc.) I have no problem with it taking a “best guess,” but it would be nice if the user had easy access through Jaikoz to the other 11 options, if they’re not happy with that guess. [/quote]
I quite agree, It would nice to be able to choose one of the other options that is why I am going to add manual option that allows you to match your files, but popup when there are multiple options - probably not after every record but maybe in batches of 10. But I wasnt going to put it into the default option because some people like to do an initial match of all their files in one , they maybe matching 10,000 songs so tend to leave Jaikoz running unattended. If popups occurred during the matching that would infuriate the user, and an option that allowed users to review multiple matches after running the task would not be very useful because of the time elapsed between the doing the original match and reviewing it.