SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Compatibility questions

#1

I am about to start the move from CDs to digital. The decision on platform has been made for me - the teenagers who infest this house have iPhones, so we already have two docks compatible with those. I have therefore acquired a second-hand iPod Touch, but with the intention I will store a master rip on an NAS.

I think the format I want to use is Apple Lossless as I have a lot of acoustic and classical works. I tried ripping and syncing 4 CDs, but iTunes could not find album art for these. I assume therefore that other metadata is probably missing too. LifeHacker sent me to Jaikoz.

The trial version found some of the album art but hasn’t saved that to the iTunes library. Will the full version? Are these issues because I am using the ALAC format, and more generally is there anything that I need to look out for with Apple Lossless? Finally, is using iTunes to import the CDs the optimum method? I have around 300 CDs so I am looking at 6 weeks of keeping CDs spinning…but I only want to have to do this once.

#2

I can tell you what I found worked best from an end users point of view. I have an extremely large collection which a lot of it came from ripping physical CDs.

For CD ripping as well as converting lossless files to lossy, I use dBpoweramp. I find this program works the best for giving bit perfect ripping. I typically rip my files at a 256 mp3 using the lame codec. I find this gives the best sound quality vs size. If you listen to music on your ipod and it was ripped at 192 or higher mp3 with a modern day mp3 code, you won’t hear the difference from lossless. Even with using audiophile stereo equipment, most can not hear the difference. I only notice it if I listen to it on my friend professional recording studio. But then again his monitors (speakers) are designed to play sound in it’s truest form and almost nothing sounds good on them. Even the slightest mistake or off pitch you can pick up on them with even some of the biggest musicians. Most stereos are designed to add some colorization to make the music sound more pleasant to the ear.

I choose mp3 mainly because it has a higher compatibility in most software and devices. Makes it easier to use.

Dbpoweramp typically will pick up most of the basic tags on cd rips. I then load all the music into jaikoz. This allows jaikoz to fill in the blanks on the cd rips as well as add all the data to the files that I converted from one format to another which dbpoweramp does not add ot.

Between the two programs, I am able to keep a very high quality, well tagged, and well structured set of music.

#3

I looked at dBpoweramp as a way of preserving some quality, but it seemed to just add an extra step as then I would need to re-import the tracks into iTunes. And some metadata would be lost again, in so doing. Or am I misunderstanding?

What set me off down the Lossless path is noticing the poor quality of some CDs copied by the kids onto their iThings. I should really do some blind testing to see if I can tell the difference on the better quality dock in the living room!

#4

I would recommend going with a lossless format, then you can always reencode later down the line if your situation changes without having going back to physical CD’s. And if you are in a mainly Apple environment Apple Lossless seems like a sensible way to go.

With Jaikoz nothing is saved until you save changes, and only 20 files can be saved with the trial, so are you sure you have actually saved the changes.

On a Mac Jaikoz is configured by default to inform iTunes of changes, but with Windows they are not. So you may need to do Get Info on the files with iTunes for iTunes to updates its cache.

#5

Thanks, the changes I have saved did import to iTunes when I used Get Info! I picked the wrong CDs as a trial import, four compilations from a series, but sorting out the naming issues will be good practice.

Looks like a buy then :slight_smile:

#6

Okay great, so to enable iTunes support you can enable Preferences:Save:iTunesUpdate

Note a few things you should know about iTunes if you don’t already, if you add songs from files already on your harddrive iTunes copies them to its iTunes Media/Music folder so you end up with two copies of each file unless you disable this in iTunes:Preferences:Advanced:Copy files to iTunes folder when adding to library, although this is probably not a problem for you as you are ripping a CD rather than copying files.

Secondly iTunes also move and renames files based on the metadata by default. So if you make changes in Jaikoz, then save changes and make some more changes and try and save again that second save could fail if iTunes has moved the files from under you. Also there is little point in using Jaikoz to rename files and folders if iTunes is configured to rename them. So I always recommend disabling iTunes:Preferences:Keep iTunes Media folder organized. Jaikoz renaming is much more powerful so you can always mimic iTunes folder/file renaming using Jaikoz if you want.

#7

That’s really helpful thanks! I was going to plough in and just start uploading to iTunes but I’ve heard so many people say they’ve had to redo this that it’s worth getting things configured properly from the start :slight_smile: