SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

God - Is this a complicated piece of software?

#1

Hi all. I’ve just downloaded Jaikoz as I used tuneup previously, but I found it just wasn’t changing things exactly how I wanted them to.

However, the good thing was that tuneup was extremely easy to use - just drag and drop out of itunes and it cleaned the music up.

Could someone explain (in plain english please) how I can simply ‘start again’ with my music collection. i.e. it’s in a mess, lots of things called the wrong names, artwork not correct, etc, etc.

All I want to do is load the music (which is all in my itunes media library folder) and press a button and go to bed. When I wake up, all the music be correctly labeled, artwork, etc?

I’m sure this software can do this, but to a simpleton like me, I just don’t know where to start!

Perhaps I should have used the trial first before buying it lol

#2

Trust me, once you get the hang of it, you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.

Without knowing anything about your collection it’s hard to know what you want. Your file structure is also important, so your workflow will vary depending on how you have things sorted.

You should probably start off with the Autocorrector. You can drag folders/files directly into Jaikoz. If you have your files in \\ format then you should be able to hit the autocorrector button (the clipboard/pencil button up top) and see what happens. If you have a pile of files under a single artist folder, things can get messy. You can try to group them using the column headers to try to sort, or you can select files of a known album and RMB>Autocorrect and see what happens. It may be wise - depending on the mess - to use AcoustIDs (red music note button up top) before any autocorecting, as this will try to better match with some pre-existing data.

If you have a pretty structured system, you can drop several thousand files in and have the Autocorrector work on them while you do something else. Keep in mind that nothing is saved until you hit the ‘Save’ button. As a beginner, browse through all the highlighted fields (purple by default) and confirm that it’s doing what you want. If things are matching funny, you can select a release and RMB>Action>Match to Release>“match to one MB”. If you know it should be something else, you can look up the release ID at Musicbrainz and RMB>Action>Match to Release>“match to specified”. You can always RMB>Save>“Revert to saved” to take you to where you started.

If it doesn’t bring up the artwork you’d like, you can select the files of that album, find an image on Google, and drag it into the bottom pane where it has “Summary|Info|Musicbrainz|etc” tabs and it will replace all the art in those files.

Don’t go changing things under Preferences unless you know what they do. I’ve fallen for this several times, where you make a lot of guesses on what you want, and then it pukes something back entirely different. Then you have to remember what you changed to switch it back the way it was.

Read the errors. Jaikoz gives you some decent info. You can usually look these up in MusicBrainz and see what the problem is. Aside from some DB errors, it’s usually a problem with your files not matching what MusicBrainz expects. Don’t just click through like it’s some BS Windows dialog.

You’ll find yourself dealing with details you never knew existed. iTunes:PlayDoh::Jaikoz:Erector Set. It looks very complicated at first, but it will get much easier.

Try it out and post back with some results.

#3

Ah, right thank you. I’ve done a sample on a couple of tracks and it seems to work good.

How do I know what data is getting changed and is there somewhere I can get it to change the file name to the track name?

Thanks again!

#4

If you just want to fix your songs you can just try using the File methods to open the the files and the Autcoorrect to fix them, then review changes and if happy save changes. Whilst Jaikoz has many options for most users they are not necessary, Im interested in what it was that didn’t make this clear as I would like to improve the ease of use of Jaikoz.

If you have View/Show Detail Pane enabled then the Changes tab show the pending changes for the currently selected song.

If you have View/Show View Pane enabled the screen splits and you can see what is currently saved in top half, and compare with what is pending saves in the bottom half. Differences are clearer if changes are colour coded, this is enabled in Preferences/Table/Synchronization/Highlight changes in different colour

Yes, Action/File and Folder Correct/Correct Filename from Metadata will do it, but I note you are using iTunes and if you are letting iTunes organize your music by having Keep iTunes Media Folder organized enabled (which it is by default) you probably dont want to do this.

If iTunes isn’t renaming/moving files then you then Correct Filename from Metadata is fo renaming the file and Correct Subfolder from Metadata is for renaming the folders it resides in. It uses the masks defined in Preferences:File and Folder Correct

#5

Something to note: If you want more accurate matches, it’s best to open an entire album. This depends on the album, but it will narrow the search down from VA, Best Of, and re-issue releases.

AutoCorrecting just a couple tracks will still work and will fix your filename/caps/artists/etc, it just may return some strange release info cos it won’t know which one those tracks belongs to.

#6

Yes, Jaikoz is optimized for matching releases, and a few at a time. Just trying to fix the odd standalone file is not really what it is designed for.

#7

Could there be a switch? The problem I have with matching releases is the following: When I rip my own compilation CDs I just want to archive what I have and keep them in that structure (Various Artists/Megastars 12/01-foo bar). However, when I run Jaikoz over stuff I dowloaded and which is unorganized I want to match to release. However, the pattern seems to become more and more: If I autocorrect my own discs they get matched to the release album, if I auto random stuff, I get examples like this:

Rock Around the Clock\tBill Haley & His Comets\tPartyPack\t01\t13\tOriginal film tv music\t1954\tFront Cover\tVarious\t\t\tRock Times, Volume 1: 1955-1956\t1989

Another try to match this file resulted in genre being ‘House’. Also, the Original-Album is not ‘Rock Times <…>’ from ‘1989’. This clealy is not Jaikoz’ fault. Since this is not the only time, this happens, it seems the databases are dirty. Very dirty.

I just wanted to re-tag the “Rolling Stones Magazine’s Top 500 Songs of All Time” for my mum’s MP3 player and >60% of songs got categorized in “Party Music”, “Top 10 Smash Hits”, “21 grandes sucessos”, "Best Of"s and similar. Over 60%! When I try to manually look up the different numeric MusicBrainz IDs on their server I get no matches at all. I am very frustrated now. Again, I know, this is not an Jaikoz issue. What happened to MusicBrainz?

#8

Thanks a lot about thinking into this! I thought about it, too! :wink: The first step I would take is the have ‘Presets’ or 'Sets". My use cases for Jaikoz can be categorized like this:

a) On my private file-server I store my own rips as FLAC, with full featured meta-data, album-covers in folders ordered in artist/album/track file-system hierarchy. All others (downloads) get corrected and maximum tagged, too. This is my reference source.

b) From there I may export to Smartphones, MP3 players in the family&friends. Here the needs are different case by case. Some MP3 players do not understand the one or other ID3 revision, have problems displaying album art of a certain raster format, etc.

Doing (a) is easy. I set the preferences and all is good. But a soon I want to share from my collection I need to change the prefs, sometimes just a little. The next time I want to do (a) I must reset them to the way they were before. That takes a lot of time. So, if I could save different preferences-presets, that would be a bliss.

Another feature going along with this would be an ‘Export’ function. Basically a ‘Copy & Save’ instead of ‘Save & Copy’. This way I do not need to copy all the files over to another folder manually, before changing them. It would be even cooler, if a user-task could be inserted here. Like a script, that recodes the stuff to MP3.

Last but not least I wish for a “Wizard” like interface.
page 1: Select the preset, the folder(s)/files to be added, a pre-process hook, a post-process hook (for scripts), and hit “Next”. It could be made so, that the presets also define the complete workflow, which would be presented at the beginning, so the user may change this or that temporarily. This would become especially interesting if one could defince ‘User Actions’ in between any step, meaning execution of a script with Jaikoz passing arguments to it.

page 2: We get the well known table, the info pane at the bottom, a special toggle button, that puts the original file data as read only, ghosted below is the changed track (within the table) or such. Here we ‘apply’ our workflow.

page 3: What to do now? Simply save and quit (session was inplace editing), select volume/path to exort to, save&move, transcode script, upload to cloud, etc.

Basically the problem with usability ATM is the sheer amount of preferences, that can be altered. Comparing the features of Jaikoz is like comparing the cockpit of a Jumbo-Jet to the one of a single propelled sports plane. :wink:

#9

Genres are dirty, they are subjective, and on Musicbrainz they are user contributed but are not voted on. So automatically populating genres cannot be relied on, its just a starting point for your own subjective categorization of music. However there are quite alot of options you can set to modify genre behaviour so look into them.

Genres from Discogs are more consistent, but of course not all songs in Musicbrainz wil have a link to a Discogs release.

It has been requested before to have multiple Autocorrecter tasks configured, and its on my todo list. One workaround you could do is have multiple users configured on your computer because each user have their own Jaikoz preferences. So when you want to scenario 1 login as user1, for scenario 2 switch to user 2 ectera.

Im also considering making preferences a simple text file. This would have two advantages:

Jaikoz would start more quickly
You could edit the preferences outside of Jaikoz and have multiple configurations.

#10

It’s not the genres. It’s the fact, that way over 60% of album names I got were “Best Of…”, “Top Of The Crop”, “Super Smash Hits Collection”. And this makes me think, that the whole Musicbraiz database is not really usable anymore. Because, as far as I remember, it wanted to focus on original releases first, then on any other release, second. It may be interesting for some people (none come to my mind) to know about every single release on a song on a “Best Of Rock’N’Roll”, that has been issued in Africa or Asia (or from Europe for the people from these continents) but it is not really interesting for the average home user. Do you have a little bit of background info, what happened to MusicBrainz or why I get these results? And why can’t I simply take the MusicBrainz ID (or any other) and enter it into the search form and get a result at their site?

#11

[quote=amix]
It’s not the genres. It’s the fact, that way over 60% of album names I got were “Best Of…”, “Top Of The Crop”, “Super Smash Hits Collection”. And this makes me think, that the whole Musicbraiz database is not really usable anymore. Because, as far as I remember, it wanted to focus on original releases first, then on any other release, second. It may be interesting for some people (none come to my mind) to know about every single release on a song on a “Best Of Rock’N’Roll”, that has been issued in Africa or Asia (or from Europe for the people from these continents) but it is not really interesting for the average home user. Do you have a little bit of background info, what happened to MusicBrainz or why I get these results? [/quote]

Search results are only as accurate as your queries, in this case your music collection. Jaikoz takes any existing tag info (if any), track times (I think it’s �3s), and AcoustIDs into account and returns what it thinks is correct based on what you’ve provided. If you have a sloppy collection, you’ll get sloppy results.

I’m curious though - since you rip down from FLACs, and assuming your FLACs are genuine rips - if there’s something else going on. What happens if you find the MBID you want and Action>Match to Release>Match to specified? Do you get a “song duration” or “cannot find track xx” error? If that’s the case, then you likely have a problem with your files.

[quote]
And why can’t I simply take the MusicBrainz ID (or any other) and enter it into the search form and get a result at their site?[/quote]
You can, but not really a search. Just copy/paste the MBID behind http://musicbrainz.org/release/. You can do the same for /artist/, /release-group/, etc. Or, in Jaikoz, you can View>View This (thing) at Musicbrainz.

#12

Wait, what exactly is your situation? Are you still loading a bunch of randoms and trying to match individual albums out? If so, and you’re not getting what you want, you’ll need to apply a bit of human intelligence.

I would run the AC on everything and that should get at least the Artist. Then I would group the artists by clicking the “Artist” column header and try to AC only one artist at a time. If that isn’t working then you’d have to do something like the Manual Corrector or selecting tracks from a known album or pasting the album name in, etc. When you run the AC, if an album is missing one track or one of those tracks has a short time on it, the AC will not see this as an album to use, which is prolly why you’re getting all those VA releases.

When I first used Jaikoz on my mess I found I had a TON of incompletes. It was a lot of work to clean up and usually quicker to re-rip or DL the really messed up things.

#13

[quote=amix]
It’s the fact, that way over 60% of album names I got were “Best Of…”, “Top Of The Crop”, “Super Smash Hits Collection”.[/quote]
Make sure you have Preferences:Remote Correct:Prefer do not Match to Various Artists and Preferences:Remote Correct:Prefer do not Match to Single Artists enabled.