Feature (pre-purchase) questions

[falcotron]

There’s some stuff that Picard does that’s very important to me, and I can’t tell from the features list whether Jaikoz can do them all. Here’s a list:

• Map MusicBrainz’ Album Artist Sort field to the TSO2 frame in ID3 tags, like the TSO2 plugin.
• Open a webpage to create a new release, already filled in with all the info from my tags, like the Add Cluster as Release… plugin.
• The website “Tagger” button (link to localhost:8000). I’m sure the manual match thing is nice, but sometimes it’s faster to find a release on the website and then tell Picard I found it.
• An equivalent to “cluster lookup” that works at least as well. (In other words, because this track is in the same cluster as that one, it must be from this album that has both of those tracks, not the only 28 releases that have one without the other.)
• Pull additional metadata from last.fm, like the lastfmplus plugin.
• Add to iTunes after tagging, at least what the Add to iTunes plugin does, ideally better (e.g., if iTunes moves the file, Jaikoz should know the new location–in fact, it would be nice if it could open stuff from iTunes and do all kinds of other stuff).

There’s also one feature Picard doesn’t have that I’d love (and may end up writing a plugin for): Arbitrary tag remapping. For example, let’s I want to take all the individual values from genre, mood, occasion, and folksonomy tags and turn them into a comma-separated list in the TCON frame (so I can search them/build smart folders around them/etc. in iTunes). Or cram all the fields I’m interested that iTunes won’t show into an rfc822 header at the top of the USLT frame (so I can see them all in the Lyrics tab in iTunes). I haven’t figured out how people could specify what they want without having to write their own Python, but I’m sure it’s doable, and maybe you’ve come up with a good interface that I couldn’t imagine and already implemented it in Jaikoz?

Finally, is Jaikoz extensible in any way, like Picard’s plugins and script engine? Half of what I love about Picard is actually added by plugins, often because it’s useless to most people, or would even get in the way for some people. If I find something Jaikoz can’t do that I need (and that maybe nobody else cares about), am I just out of luck?

Thanks.

[paultaylor]

• Map MusicBrainz’ Album Artist Sort field to the TSO2 frame in ID3 tags, like the TSO2 plugin.

Yes, just add the Album Artist Column to the main edit screen to see this.

• Open a webpage to create a new release, already filled in with all the info from my tags, like the Add Cluster as Release… plugin.

No, not at the moment.

• The website “Tagger” button (link to localhost:8000). I’m sure the manual match thing is nice, but sometimes it’s faster to find a release on the website and then tell Picard I found it.

Yes, a few ways you can do this, if you run Manual Tag from Musicbrainz , add the View column, you can then press the search button which will open the Musicbrainz Webpage with a search done , you can then click on the Tagger button or do another search to pick the track from the Website.

But an easier more recent addition is the Match to Release/Match to Specified Musicbrainz Release task. Select the songs for one release, then select this option and enter the Musicbrainz Id and Jaikoz will match the sonsg to the correct track on the release. In the future I’ll add a button to the dialog so that you can open the Musicbrainz search from within the Jaikoz dialog, but for now you just open the page manually and copy and paste the Musicbrainz Release Id

• An equivalent to “cluster lookup” that works at least as well. (In other words, because this track is in the same cluster as that one, it must be from this album that has both of those tracks, not the only 28 releases that have one without the other.)

The Correct from Musicbrainz task has been rewritten to be much better at matching whole albums, the correcter is now album orientated and it only falls back to song by song matching if unable to find a whole album match. Beta should be available by the end of this week.

• Pull additional metadata from last.fm, like the lastfmplus plugin.

There is no plugin support at the moment, but it is envisaged

• Add to iTunes after tagging, at least what the Add to iTunes plugin does, ideally better (e.g., if iTunes moves the file, Jaikoz should know the new location–in fact, it would be nice if it could open stuff from iTunes and do all kinds of other stuff).

Yes, Jaikoz informs iTunes of changes, this is enabled by default on the mac, has to be enabled (In Preferences/Save/iTunes Update) for Windows.

There’s also one feature Picard doesn’t have that I’d love (and may end up writing a plugin for): Arbitrary tag remapping. For example, let’s I want to take all the individual values from genre, mood, occasion, and folksonomy tags and turn them into a comma-separated list in the TCON frame (so I can search them/build smart folders around them/etc. in iTunes).

Because Jaikoz edit window works rather like a spreadsheet and has edit functions like ‘Prepend to Left’,‘Swap Columns’ and ‘Paste All Values’ it is easy to move tags around enmass. Also Jaikoz has Advanced/Export function to export the metadata to a spreadsheet, you can then make changes and reimport the tags back into your files.

Specifically to genres Jaikoz has options to copy (multiple)genres to both the genre field AND the grouping field to allow for smart playlists. take a look at Preferences/Musicbrainz/AutoFormat 2 and Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs

[quote=falcotron]
Finally, is Jaikoz extensible in any way, like Picard’s plugins and script engine? Half of what I love about Picard is actually added by plugins, often because it’s useless to most people, or would even get in the way for some people. If I find something Jaikoz can’t do that I need (and that maybe nobody else cares about), am I just out of luck?
.[/quote]
Plugin support hasnt been added yet, but I do intend to do it, see first issue
in the list below

http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/issues/new.html

[falcotron]

Thanks for the quick reply. I downloaded the demo to play with it, and so far it looks like it might be worth switching, even without the “Add to Musicbrainz” and “lastfmplus” stuff.

One big thing I forgot to ask about, which I just tested myself: It looks like (just like Picard, but I can hack up my local copy of that…), Jaikoz on the Mac responds to high-level open events by accepting and ignoring them. If I drag a file to the Jaikoz app icon in the dock, nothing happens.

Which means there’s no way to get it to add files/folders from AppleScript/appscript/Automator/etc. (e.g., as the last step in a rip script, or after tagging with genpuid, or whatever).

Obviously you’d need this for your bug 1513 (which might just be a one-liner, ‘tell app “Jaikoz” to open location of selection’–but 864 seems like it would need more complete scriptability, whether AppleScript/OSA or just a command-line API).

The spreadsheet export is incredibly cool.

In fact, if there were a way to script this, that would replace half of the need for plugins or scripting. (Export a .csv file, run your external script on it, re-import, and your external script almost becomes a plugin. Especially if there were a Scripts menu like the one in iTunes, which I is pretty easy to add even if your app isn’t really scriptable…) But only half; some things are a lot easier to do with access to the internal model and support functions and so on.

It would be even nicer if the Jaikoz database were just a sqlite or bdb or MySQL or whatever, and even more so if scripts had live access to that (well, not so much with bdb, but with MySQL in particular it would be very cool).

Sorry for throwing all this stuff at you when I haven’t even 100% committed to giving you any money, much less given it to you, but you can always ignore me if you want.

[paultaylor]

One big thing I forgot to ask about, which I just tested myself: It looks like (just like Picard, but I can hack up my local copy of that…), Jaikoz on the Mac responds to high-level open events by accepting and ignoring them. If I drag a file to the Jaikoz app icon in the dock, nothing happens.

Which means there’s no way to get it to add files/folders from AppleScript/appscript/Automator/etc. (e.g., as the last step in a rip script, or after tagging with genpuid, or whatever).

Ah, actually if Jaikoz is open/maxised you can drag songs and m3u playlists onto it, it just doesnt work when its minimized but I’ll take a look at this.

Obviously you’d need this for your bug 1513 (which might just be a one-liner, ‘tell app “Jaikoz” to open location of selection’–but 864 seems like it would need more complete scriptability, whether AppleScript/OSA or just a command-line API).

Right, my applescript knowledge is slight, but for that tell command to work wouldnt I need to add some kind of applescript wrapper round jaikoz or not ?

In fact, if there were a way to script this, that would replace half of the need for plugins or scripting. (Export a .csv file, run your external script on it, re-import, and your external script almost becomes a plugin. Especially if there were a Scripts menu like the one in iTunes, which I is pretty easy to add even if your app isn’t really scriptable…) But only half; some things are a lot easier to do with access to the internal model and support functions and so on.

Sounds doable

It would be even nicer if the Jaikoz database were just a sqlite or bdb or MySQL or whatever, and even more so if scripts had live access to that (well, not so much with bdb, but with MySQL in particular it would be very cool).

Its a proper SQL database (derby) , its just that it is embedded mode so it doesnt run seperately to Jaikoz, its started by Jaikoz. I suppose it would be possible for it to be run by something else but I would be very wary of letting another application access and possibly corrupt it.

[quote=falcotron]
Sorry for throwing all this stuff at you when I haven’t even 100% committed to giving you any money, much less given it to you, but you can always ignore me if you want. :)[/quote]
No problem Im always happy to hear new ideas