Sorry I missed the option question threads regarding compilations because they were asked before I came across Jaikoz. Had I been a member then I for one would have said a resounding YES - we do need the option!
What I wanted to say has already been said earlier:
“This may be an option that the majority of users don’t need but I’ve found the best software, such as MediaMonkey is so successful just because of the fact they offer features/options that appeal to the widest audience take everyone’s needs into account.”
Personally, Jaikoz doesn’t do exactly what I want yet, but it’s way, way closer than any of the other taggers out there.
The point is that everyone stores their MP3 music collections in different ways. Some of you may just collect albums - in which case any tagger will do a reasonable job of on-line look-up.
I don’t. I’m trying to sort out the MP3 library for a radio station - basically a terrabyte hard disk of single files - and a few albums.
Most are in folders like ‘Sixties’ (which contain all the chart single releases between 1960 and 1969) and ‘Seventies’ (releases between 1970 and 1979)… and so on. There are 30-40 or so other folders like Rock, Motown, Country, Reggae and so on - each containing up to 10,000 MP3 tracks.
The folder I’m working on at this moment in time is called ‘Unsorted’ and that alone contains 30,667 MP3s!
My first priority is to move all the 60s, 70s, 80s etc. tracks into their respective decades folders and to do that they need to be dated with the correct year of release. There must be many duplicates and incorrectly tagged/named files in the wrong locations.
So to me, Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite is a 1957 song. I don’t give a toss that it was re-released and got to number 1 in 1986 - or that it has appeared on countless 1950s compilation albums in the years since it’s original release.
It’s also of no interest to me that I just happen to have a version that came from one of these later albums and is a different length - because I want the song to be looked up using it’s filename only, ignoring the length, size and acoustic fingerprint of the file.
If a listener phones in and wants to hear that Jackie Wilson song, they (or we) aren’t going to be all that bothered which particular version it is that gets played.
Likewise, if our playout system is asked to generate a random playlist for a show with music from a particular decade, we want Reet Petite to only get played in the 50s show.
The new beta version of Jaikoz does indeed go a good way towards making what I personally need in a tagger possible - without a lot of tedious tweaking, and from my personal requirements, the only option I can see missing is quite simple:
[] Always Select Oldest Year On Remote Look-Up
With that option enabled, any incorrect years for the original release dates will be down to the online database - not Jaikoz.
With the current limitations of most taggers in mind, I’ve actually written my own MP3 dating software which I can use after using Jaikoz to correct faulty release date years returned by the on-line databases.
It uses it’s own built-in database, but it’s still quite small at the moment (it currently only has 22,455 songs in it).
It works perfectly, but at the moment only does exact matches using the MP3 filename format ‘Artiste Name - Song Title’ (non case-sensitive). A missing apostrophe in the word Don’t will currently not find a match.
To avoid this, I’m now writing a ‘fuzzy’ match function which will match songs even with minor differences.
Let me know if anyone else would find this program useful for use in conjunction with Jaikoz. If enough people are, (with with Paul’s permission), maybe I could start a thread for it elsewhere.
TenBaz
