SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Copying tags from one set of files to another

#1

Noob, first post…

Jaikoz looks very sweet, much more sophisticated than any other tagging program I’ve seen. It’s also a bit overwhelming at first glance.

I’m in the process of re-ripping all my CDs to Apple Lossless before any of them become unreadable. I ripped them to lossy AAC some time ago and I’d like to transfer the existing tags and artwork (which I spent many hours on) to the new files. Can do I do this in Jaikoz? If so, how?

#2

Hi, yes you could do it as follows:

For the artwork part this solution assumes your songs are organized one album per folder/one disc per folder basis

Also, exactly how you do this depends on the names of the new files, ideally you want same name as the lossy just stored in a different folder.

  1. Load your lossy AAC files into Jaikoz
  2. Run Save Artwork to Filesystem to save your embedded artwork to filesystem
  3. Run Advanced:Export as Xls format this will save all your textual metadata in a spreadsheet
  4. Edit the first column of spreadsheet to change the filenames to lossless version of files
  5. Close all files in Jaikoz
  6. Open lossless files in Jaikoz
  7. Run Advanced:Import and select your modified spreadsheet, as long as the filenames match this will update the songs with the metadata that was originally in the lossy versions.
  8. Run Action:Local Correct:Correct Artwork to embed artwork in filesystem into files themselves, however for this to work you need to copy all the artwork from the corresponding lossy album folder to lossless folder , not sure the easiuest way to do this, as operating system dependent.

Of course you can also load both sets of files into Jaikoz and copy/paste between various files but this not suitable way to transfer data for a large quantity of files.

#3

Thanks, Paul. This is what I had vaguely envisioned but now I understand the process much better.

But I still have this question: is there a simple way to do the metadata transfer one album at a time, from a single set of files to another, without a lot of copying and pasting, manually moving/duplicating files, etc.? I’ve looked at several other tagging apps and only one of them could do this (or so it seemed). This is a feature I really want as I have already spent a ridiculous amount of time on the tags and artwork for over a thousand albums.

I always create a 600 x 600 cover picture called “Cover.jpg” and place it in the root of the album folder. Would I have to change this arrangement in order for Jaikoz to work its magic on multiple versions of the same album? From your reply I get the impression that I would have to place a copy in each folder.

I need to understand these (and a few more) things before I:

[list]mess up my entire music collection[/list]
[list]Make the plunge and buy Jaikoz.[/list]

As you may have already realized this is a classic example of someone who has a lot of experience and is frustrated by the learning curve of a totally new program. I know what I want to do, I just haven’t figured out how to do it?yet.

Note that I don’t let iTunes manage my library. I keep everything on an external RAID1 which is backed up to a second drive that is kept in another building.

I hope this makes sense. I’m so sick of the metadata editor in iTunes I could scream. I should have gotten an app like Jaikoz years ago. :expressionless:

#4

Hi

Im a little confused because the solution I provided with seeks to avoid any copying/pasting and can be done in a single stage to transfer all your textual metadata in one go. But you ask for a method that works one album at a time, but clearly this would take you substantially longer.

You can certainly load both versions of an album into Jaikoz and for each song copy and paste the entire row form old file to new file, but this is much more work then my Export/Import method.

I dont quite follow the question about the artwork. But essentially what Im saying is if you have a artwork in foldera, but you want the artwork to be added to songs in folderb then you either need to

  1. Copy artwork from foldera to folderb or
  2. Copy and paste within Jaikoz
  3. Get artwork using Remote matching to MusicBrainz/Discogs

But what I suggest you do is just try Jaikoz, the free trial would let you load your songs, and use the Export/Import functions. The only limitation with the trial is you can only save 20 songs in one session.

This bring s us to another important design feature of Jaikoz nothing is modified in the files themselves until you do File:Save. You can check the process and the results and ensure that nothing is messed up BEFORE making any lasting changes.