Over the last couple of years, I have used a lot of mp3 tagging softwares in Linux, Windows and Mac. And, finally did settle down with Jaikoz. It is indeed unique in the way it presents the music files/data and the User Interface can certainly use a facelift.
What I realized is that the MusicBrainz & AmpliFind services don’t necessarily always have the most accurate or even any data and we need to manually search the internet and make mass & fast edits. One such area is the Album Artwork. None of the tagging tools I have tried till date does a good job. Although, I found TuneUP’s approach to be interesting where it will scourge the internet (Amazon, Google images and other sources) and present a few image options for the song and lets the user pick the right one. I have painfully done this manually using Jaikoz and Google images by using the Album name and year and sometimes have had to use the Title.
Being a long time power user of mp3 tagging tools, I suggest the following features for Jaikoz:
Search/Fetch Album Artwork for every song based on its Album, Year and sometimes Title and present the user with the images to select from.
Custom filters: The built-in filters are good, but sometimes I just need to view only a subset of the collection that has or does not have certain text/pattern in one or many tags.
Worklist: Sometimes I just don’t want to work on the entire (Hindi, English, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, etc) collection but on just one of them. Currently, I have to manually work on Hindi. Close all the files, re-add English … It would be nice if we could create Smart Worklists/Playlists by certain criteria, like folder name has Hindi or English or some pattern in it then add to the Hindi / Engligh smart playlist.
File/Folder/Tag fill/renaming: It would be nice to see live examples of the user defined masks. Also, EasyTag in Linux allows me to pick up the Album year from the folder that contains the music file.
Manual update from remote should show the Integer number of files or even ‘All’ when using the slider setting.
Allow Sorting and even a filter for all the files that have been updated/modified/changed. Currently, they are all over the place in a large collection and one cannot get a sense of just how many files got updated. MusicIP Mixer will show you a new Window with all that it proposes to be changed and the user can select/deselect from this list.
Selection count: The status bar should show the count of currently selected objects (rows/fields)
Vocal Artist: There should be a way to pull down the “Vocals performed by” information in some tag for the user to decide later if he wants to use it in the Artist or any other field.
Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)
I don’t have much time but I want to address a couple of points:
[quote=sandeepkhanna]
Allow Sorting and even a filter for all the files that have been updated/modified/changed. Currently, they are all over the place in a large collection and one cannot get a sense of just how many files got updated. MusicIP Mixer will show you a new Window with all that it proposes to be changed and the user can select/deselect from this list.[/quote]
There is a column for Status. If that file has a change pending, it will be labled with a C. If you have selected it for deletion, it will have a D in it. The color of field will also change based on your preferences. The default for tracks pending a deletion is red. I do not remember the default color for changed files (light blue?), but I made mine a bright orange. You can sort by this column (or any column for that matter) by clicking the column header. So you can sort all your changed files to the top, for example.
[quote=sandeepkhanna]
Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)[/quote]
The changed fields in Jaikoz are highlighted. I don’t remember the default but I think it is a light blue. On some monitors, particularly if you are remote viewing, if the color bit depth is low, this light blue is hard to tell. In the jaikoz preferences I made mine a bright orange so it will stand out.
If you aren’t seeing any changes, go to the toolbar/menubar and check the View menu. The Edit panel should be selected?
If you have playlists created from other programs, jaikoz can open them. I do this all the time. For instance I export iTunes playlists of what it thinks are duplicates into m3u format and have jaikoz open that playlist to work on only those files. You could make a Hindi, English, or Tamil, etc playlist, export it and open in Jaikoz to work on that subset.
Its not really the philosophy of Jaikoz to require users to make choices like this, but I expect I will have to add this for those difficult albums.
Of course you can use the search box on the right handside to limit results to those with matching value in album/artist or title. But I can see that extending this to other fields and to allow reguar expressions would be useful.
Jaikoz can open playlists, but its not a playlist creator. But you could use the Tag Browser to filter results by genre for example.
What do you mean, just an example or a way to preview any file because running it ?
Sorry, I dont understand this one.
Yes, you can sort by status, but not filter at the moment that is a good idea.
Yes, might make things more user-friendly
Yes, this could be added.
[quote=sandeepkhanna]
Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)[/quote]
The View/Show View Pane option splits the screen and shows the files as they are currently saved, with the modified fields highlighted for easy comparison.
After hours of looking around on the internet, I came across “Album Art Downloader”. This is a fantastic piece of software and it automated some of my manual clicks when use Google images for Artwork. Unfortunately, AAD is Windows only so I had to use Jaikoz, AAD and a browser for doing IMDB searches all from within a VirtualBox virtual machine. It would be nice if we could have some similar functionality built-into Jaikoz. That would certainly make it one of the TOP tagging tools considering that very few to none have this functionality built-in and integrated.
Of course you can use the search box on the right handside to limit results to those with matching value in album/artist or title. But I can see that extending this to other fields and to allow reguar expressions would be useful.
Genres cannot be used for what I am looking. I am using the Grouping tag to group all Hindi, English, Arabic, etc music. But, even that is manual and is not SMART. People don’t typically mix these different groups of songs in one folder and would have different folders for them. My request is not for playlists but, WORK LISTs. So, I don’t have to close and open different groups of files and NO I certainly don’t want to use a static iTunes playlist for this considering that the song files, location may change over the course of tag editing.
In “File And Folder Correct”, the shipped masks will be updated by the user sometimes accidentally and may mess up the Actions. There should be some ‘Reset to default’ for such fields all throughout the application (a la Microsoft).
In “Correct Metadata From Filename”, Linux EasyTag will take the following file:
/home/sandeepk/Music/Hindi/Some Movie (2010)/Some Movie - Some Title.mp3 and fill the Album, Title and Year tags with the following mask.
%a (%y)/%a - %t . No matter how I write my masks, it will show me the mask in action using the selected file. Once, I am confident with one and my music collection has been stored in more or less the same format, I can run the “Fill tags” action over the entire collection.
Preferences -> MusicBrainz->Manualmatch slider does not tell you exactly how many songs are configured to be reviewed. Also, that same integer feedback field can read “All” if taken all the way to the end.
Yes, you can sort by status, but not filter at the moment that is a good idea.
Yes, might make things more user-friendly
After finally cleaning up Hindi music collection and painfully & manually adding Artwork to all the songs, I imported this into Mac iTunes to enjoy the cover flow view. I realized that some songs from the same Album/Movie would show up individually and not grouped under one Album/Movie Cover Art. Researching around, people seem to suggest the use of “Is part of compilation” tag on such tracks. After doing that manually for couple of Albums/Tracks, I am thinking can I not just use Jaikoz to set ALL my music collection tracks to be part of compilation (checkbox checked)? Is there anything else that iTunes must be doing in the background to other tags other than setting this to true??
[quote=sandeepkhanna]
Before/After: Jaikoz will perform corrections to music/files/folders and highlight the changed entries in Blue but there is no way to know what was changed!! MusicBrainz Picard and other tools show this in the bottom pane (perhaps a new Review Changes tab in Jaikoz)[/quote]
The View/Show View Pane option splits the screen and shows the files as they are currently saved, with the modified fields highlighted for easy comparison.
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When using “manual correct metadata from MusicBrainz” or even automatic remote correct for that matter, sometimes we just want to update a few tags and not be forced to take all the tag data as part of the row selection (radio button). It would be nice to also have a checkbox on the columns (representing the tags) to only update some of the tags from the remote database.
Also, the music importing dialog box shows “songs being loaded so far” in increments of 100 and gives a very poor performance perception to the end user. Please show it either in the status bar as some of the Linux tools do or even as a dialog with a live count and song file/title “being processed” just like iTunes.
The top right corner search box is very rudimentary. It should show live results as the user is typing. It does not search very well with spaces in the search terms. For example: “Airbase Presents Moon” will not just return that but other results containing just “Airbase”, “Presents” and “Moon”. Also, highlighting parts of tag text that was found (like google) would be fantastic.
File/folder monitor/watch functionality would be great as well and would complement the smart Worklist feature.
Genres cannot be used for what I am looking. I am using the Grouping tag to group all Hindi, English, Arabic, etc music. But, even that is manual and is not SMART. People don’t typically mix these different groups of songs in one folder and would have different folders for them. My request is not for playlists but, WORK LISTs. So, I don’t have to close and open different groups of files and NO I certainly don’t want to use a static iTunes playlist for this considering that the song files, location may change over the course of tag editing.[/quote]
You ask for a “smart” playlist to be your worklist. If you can define a smart playlist in iTunes around whatever metric you are defining “work” in this instance, you can export that smart playlist, import it into Jaikoz, and begin to work. I have about 10 smart playlists in iTunes, so that if files should ever be added to the Library that meet those criteria, I can export that list and have Jaikoz fix them.
[quote=sandeepkhanna]This is a fantastic piece of software and it automated some of my manual clicks when use Google images for Artwork.
[/quote]
Yes I expect something like this will be added.
Musicbrainz has language and script fields, I dont seem to be autopopulatingthese from Jaikoz but I could do, that would take the manula work out of what you do.
I can see the idea of worklists, but Im not keen on making Jaikoz see more complex.
But when you are changing the mask in Jaikoz you are chnaging a preference for all files, there is no concept of the currently selected file so I do not see how to do that, unless you just take the 1st song.
Right, but this is minor.
I dont get this, only set as part of compilation if those songs are in a compilation.
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Just use the context menu/right click to apply the task to the selected songs.
Ok, a minor enhancement.
Yes, you are right needs more work but if you want me to allow regular expressions it difficult to show live results because the expression could be invalid until they have finished entering it.
[quote=sandeepkhanna]
File/folder monitor/watch functionality would be great as well and would complement the smart Worklist feature.[/quote]
I don’t really think this is a good fit with this tool. Because Jaikoz was not designed as a Music Manager for keeping your whole library loaded and observed , its more a program to load up your songs to fix before using them with your favorite player.