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)
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.