I see that another new user has just started a thread and I considered posting there but I really don’t want to hijack.
I use iTunes on OS X and several other Mac devices and want to continue using iTunes for simplicity. Am I correct in understanding of the behaviour that neither SongKong nor Jaikoz actually writes to the iTunes database, rather they edit the ID3 tag?
I am assessing the trial versions of SongKong and Jaikoz. I got burnt really bad after paying for TuneUp. If anyone reading this is considering buying TuneUp, don’t it’s crap.
SongKong:
The report. Is that the only format it can output in so I can check changes? As it is it’s pretty unusable, having to click into every file is way too laborious.
The average song has something like 35 additional fields added (all the song ID stuff). Is this what it’s doing? Can I turn this off, I don’t want heaps of extra stuff added that may one day cause me hassles.
In the ‘Not matched to release’ section are some songs that have been successfully matched in Jaikoz. Why?
It doesn’t fix genre’s, does it?
The file rename mask for iTunes looks wrong to me. Shouldn?t it be AlbumArtist/Album/Title? But I can see how to edit it.
Assuming everything has been matched correctly (can’t check because of the poor report formatting), I’m missing about 12% of my songs. This isn’t too bad. Will it improve over time if I run SongKong in another few months or so?
Jaikoz:
When I load up my songs from my iTunes database almost all the song titles are missing, why? This is bizarre behaviour because every single one has a title. As far as I can see all the artists have loaded in okay. I think this might also be affecting the results.
What’s with the strange genres? Some examples: +Usa new york, +Usa california, Australie, Amos lee, N2 etc.
Some of the year of releases are actual dates. I don’t want dates, just year. Can I alter this behaviour? (Don’t need explanation if ‘yes’, I will look it up).
What both do (if iTunes option enabled) is inform iTunes of files that have been edited, added and then iTunes itself updates its database accordingly, so in effect they do update the database.
The report is designed so that it is responsive even if thousands of songs fixed, which it wouldn’t be if it was just one big file, that it is not too intimidating to use and to be usable outside of SongKong (i.e html). My experience of Jaikoz was that most customers do no check the results anyway and would only want to check specific albums that went wrong, hence the drill-down design of the reports. But I am open to ideas would exporting all the changes to a spreadsheet format similar to Jaikoz Advanced/Export feature be useful ?
The song id stuff allow linking to MusicBrainz and Discogs databases, also without this information if you loaded the songs in SongKong again it wouldn’t know if they had already been matched, I cant see how this additional data could cause you problems in future.
Matching is difficult because both customer data and the online databases are incomplete so we make various assumptions to get the best match. SongKong and Jaikoz algorithms are not exactly the same and it also depends on what options you have enabled. For example SongKong has an Only allow match if all songs in album were matched but Jaikoz does not.
It does but not by default, and this feature needs more work.
Hmm, I’ll check.
Yes definitently, firstly more stuff is being added to the databases every day, secondly Im currently working on a massive improvement to Discogs matching so that SongKong will match to more songs to songs in Discogs that are currently in Discogs but not assessible because of problems with the Discogs api.
You mean that in iTunes they have a song title but in Jaikoz they do not ?
Assuming yes, this is because the songs really do not have a song title in the ID3 tag but in this case iTunes guesses the song title by using the filename instead, you can double check this by loading a file into another tag editor. This does make matching harder, you can use information in the filename to filll in metadata fields with Jaikoz but you need to set the Rename file from metadata mask accordingly.
These are Musicbrainz tags, probably best to disable genres from Musicbrainz and just use genres from Discogs.