SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Is Compilation: Jaikoz vs. iTunes

I’m using iTunes to store and play my music collection. I keep the master copy on my Macintosh laptop, where I also use Jaikoz to make the metadata more useful, by cleaning up tags on new music before adding to iTunes as well as sometimes cleaning up parts of the existing collection as needed. (It’s too big a job to clean up the entire library at once.)

When the Is Compilation flag is set, iTunes stores its files in a folder named Compilations, instead of under the Album Artist name. This makes sense when there are multiple Track Artists in the compilation, but it is inconvenient when the compilation is a single artist Greatest Hits package, for example. For these cases, I would prefer to turn off the Is Compilation flag. Is there a way to introduce this behavior into Jaikoz as a preference? If the Artist field of all of the tracks of an Album are identical, set the Album Artist field to that value and clear the Is Compilation flag, and maybe the reverse, if any two tracks of an album have Artist fields that do not match, set the Is Compilation flag to true. In that case, if the Album Artist field is blank, set it to “Various”. Personally, I would always want the first case to apply, but I can imagine some scenarios where the latter case might not apply, such as an original work (not a compilation) by a single Album Artist where each track lists that artist plus collaborating artists.

Any advice on this issue? My goal is to move album folders out of the Compilations folder and into the folder named for the Album Artist.

Your right, in fact Ive found this unresolved issue http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-36 from some time ago!
I’ve raised the priority do it gets some priority

Itunes is notorious for messing up peoples organized libraries. Most users that use itunes typically will turn off the “feature” to allow itunes to organize ones library. A well organized library should never be altered by itunes. My wife uses it to play her music, but I have that option turned off in the options. She can play things just fine. I typically will avoid itunes like the plague, especially on a pc, where it is not nearly as fine tuned and fast as it is on a mac.

This really seems like an issue on itunes side and not on jaikoz/songkong. I would rather keep compilations marked as compilations so they match what is found online and what all the other programs pull from. Makes it far easier that way to play just studio albums and not have greatest hits like albums get in the mix to add the same song over and over to the smart playlists.

[quote=Neon Scribe]

Any advice on this issue? My goal is to move album folders out of the Compilations folder and into the folder named for the Album Artist.[/quote]

I would suggest turning off itunes organize option. Use jaikoz or songkong to organize your music. I have mine setup so that it uses album artist as the folder, then album name as a sub folder, then track name for the file name. This gives me a setup much like you described where I can find all complete albums by a given artist, even best of and greatest hits, all under the root folder of that artist. My compilations albums that have multiple artists will get filed under my various artist folder which happens automatically this way as well, as most use the various artist as the album artist.

I know that it is a small issue but I find having the Jaikoz preferences stored in ~/Jaikoz extremely disruptive. Would it be possible to change the
directory to ~/.Jaikoz? Or make the location configurable?

Hi Farid, I’m not sure why you have posted on this particular thread but the later Jaikoz releases do indeed store preferences in .Jaikoz now instead of Jaikoz.