First of all, congratulations on producing perhaps the only music library cleaning program that can almost handle >10,000 track music collections. Believe me, I have tried a lot of others and this has the most promise so far apart from the issues I’ve found below (which I’m hoping are either due to my lack of understanding or down to issues that you can fix).
- In the Console output it is not clear which task is generating which output messages. Sure, the Task number is output, but it would be better if the name of the task were output as well. Rather than “Task 1:Started Correct Artists on 12 Songs” have “1) Correct Artists - Started on 12 songs” etc.
- It would be better if the tasks could provide more detailed information (perhaps an option to increase the logging detail level) so that one can deduce exactly why Jaikoz was unable to match a set of tracks to an album (was the fingerprint below threshold? was the meta data below threshold? were there multiple possible matches? what can the user do to fix the problem?). Let us know if one of the configuration settings in the Automatch tab causes the match to fail. For example, a message like this might be useful - “Unable to retrieve acoustic ID for song 14. Did not attempt tag data matching because option ‘Do not match if unable to find an Acoustic Id Match’ was enabled (try disabling)”.
3a) Highlighting changed fields in Blue is useful, but it is very difficult to decide whether the change Jaikoz will make is for the better or for the worse if we can’t see the before and after values. I suggest some way of seeing the before/after values of all the fields in the table. Perhaps a convenient way would be to have a function key (e.g. F12) to toggle all the values back and forth quickly on the selected tracks so that you can see precisely what is going to be changed if you Save. This should also work for Album art and filenames. Alternatively you could have 2 rows for each track (one showing BEFORE and the other AFTER). In Picard you can at least see the before/after for Title, Artist, Album, Track, Length, Date (but not album art).
3b) Related to the prior issue, it is highly limiting to assume that the online databases such as MB contain 100% correct tag data fields. In collections that have been ripped from CDs using Windows Media Player, it is often the case that certain tag data is already very complete and accurate (e.g. Title, Album, Track Number and in some cases even Artist, Genre and Year) whereas some fields are missing (e.g. Artwork, Album Artist). In order to be able to fix >10,000 track collections you need to be able to trust that AutoCorrect will at least not adversely affect any existing tag data. At the moment there does not seem to be any way of ensuring this automatically, nor does there seem to even be a way to check manually for this (see 3a). For example, I can see that Jaikoz has changed some of my TrackNo fields. I have “Pad numbers with zero to aid sorting” enabled so perhaps these changes are purely cosmetic formating, but perhaps the underlying values have changed - there’s no efficient way to tell. I can see error messages in the console like Album “Come on Over (International Version)” by Shania Twain is spread over 2 MusicBrainz Release Ids" and (bad) experience with Picard tells me that this usually means that some tracks have been assigned to the wrong Album (release) and therefore the tag data from MB is going to be wrong. - Get Acoustic ID working for WMA music files. At the moment it seems that Jaikoz fails to get the acoustic ID for all WMA files. If you can’t handle WMA files, then perhaps it’s worth adding a facility for converting them on-the-fly to MP3 (but not saving the converted file) to obtain the Acoustic Id. Currently this is manifested by thousands of errors in the console like “WARNING: Unable to retrieve an acoustic id for song 1,423” and “Retrieve Acoustic Ids was unable to find a match for 7,788 Songs”. This limitation is a bit of a show-stopper at the moment for large WMA collections
- Create a key binding for quickly Viewing Artwork Fullsize for the selected track
- Improve success rate for downloading album art. For example, Picard has no problem grabbing “Dave Matthews Band-Under the Table and Dreaming” (099148ab-9a81-4672-a1af-fa60261a7f15) but for some reason Jaikoz cannot even though the artwork is in the MB database.
7a) It seems that when “Acoustic Id Match must also have minimum meta rating” is true, then Jaikoz fails to find any Album art for songs without an Acoustic Id (thus all WMA files fail to find Album art).
7b) When I set this option to false then Jaikos finds album art for “K.T. Tunstall-Eye to the Telescope-Black Horse and Cherry Tree” but fails to find album art for all the other tracks in the same album even though I can see that Jaikos knows that the MB Release ID (7c62fb9c-26ad-4c9c-b08b-8361a9a1e6c7) is identical for all of the tracks in the album and therefore they share the same album art. I know you can copy and paste the missing artwork onto the other tracks but this makes the whole fixing process much too manual for a 50,000 track collection like mine.
- What is the purpose of having both the “View Pane” as well as the “Editing Pane”? It looks like the Editing pane is almost identical in content to the View Pane except it allows editing of fields. It would be more intuitive (and be more efficient in terms of screen real-estate) if both were combined into something like the current View Pane, but make every field editable.
- It is currently not possible to know if Jaikoz has changed tag data in a column that is not currently displayed. The user thus has no way of reviewing these changes before Saving. Perhaps one way to handle this would be as follows - when the user selects track(s), change the highlighting colour of each of the Tabs at the top of the View Pane to indicate which Tabs contain which sorts of changes for the current selection
- Most of my music already has reasonable tag data, it just needs to have some missing fields added. Is there any way to prevent Jaikoz from changing tags for a track and assigning a new MB Id if it is trying to split tracks with the same Album name across multiple MB Release Ids (e.g. “Album Come on Over (International Version) by Shania Twain is spread over 2 MusicBrainz Release Ids”). This is a sure sign that tags are going to get messed up especially if all those tracks reside in the same directory together (i.e. it’s even less likely that they should be from different album release ids)
- Ability to save album art as “folder.jpg”. Some music players (e.g. Sonos) sometimes has trouble displaying certain embedded album art but has no problem with folder.jpg files.
- Display the total number of files currently selected in the status bar at the bottom of the window. This would be useful for counting statistics like how many files are missing Album Art etc.
- Add TrackLength to the possible list of columns that can be displayed. This is very useful when trying to compare for matches with the MusicBrainz website. Otherwise you have to open the View Pane just so you can see the Track Length tag. Bit Rate and other commonly populated tags that are currently missing would be useful as well.
- Output in the console to indicate whether or not the “Cluster” task was successful or not in getting all the tracks in the Album into the same MusicBrainz releaseId
- It would be tremendously useful if Jaikoz could generate some kind of “Likelihood of error” score for each of the changes that it makes to each track. Then after running AutoCorrect, the user could sort the tracks by “Likelihood of error” and more quickly review the riskiest changes that Jaikoz is suggesting. At the moment the user can only review the console to try to spot potential errors in the AutoCorrect procedure. You could perhaps base part of the score formula on the Acoustic Id match score for the track. Examples of things that should raise a red flag and require user review include:
- Failure to cluster all of an album into a single MB Release Id (especially if all the tracks reside in the same directory)
- Changing the numeric value of a track
- Drastically changing the name of a track
- Drastically changing the name of an album
- Changing PlayingTime by more than 5%
- Add a context menu item “Submit Album to MusicBrainz”. This would only be enabled if sufficient meta-data is present for each of the Tracks. Jaikos would then check that the submission is not a duplicate, then automatically submit all the Release, and Track information without the user needing to visit the website at all. This would greatly increase the number of users that contribute to the website and with the appropriate checks in place would also improve data quality.
I would rate the priority of the issues as
High - 3, 4, 6, 7, 10
Medium - 9, 15, 16
Low - 1, 2, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14