Jaikoz enhancement suggestions from a new user (possibly also some bugs)

[mjw]

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).

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. Create a key binding for quickly Viewing Artwork Fullsize for the selected track
5. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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
10. 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)
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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
15. 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%

16. 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

[paultaylor]

1. True this is slightly clearer, but I would contend most applications give you no information about what they are doing.
2. Possibly, I’m not sure many people would be interested in this level of detail.
   3a. You can see what has changed, that is the purpose of the View Pane it shows what is currently saved in the files, but I can see some merit in your idea.
   3b. If you dont want values to be overwritten you can set this on a column by column basis in Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format and Format2 when updating from Musicbrainz and Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs
3. Linux only issue, but it shoudlnt even attempt to do it or there might be a way to do it by convering as you say. To be honest Ive had very little input from WMA users most people use MP3 or MP4s
4. Good idea
5. Is this because didn’t match the Musicbrainz release, or did it match the MB release but not get the associated artwork.
   7a. No that setting isnt relevent because you have done an acoustic id match, the relevent setting is Minimum Rating required if meta match only
   7b. Its not a checkbox !
6. Show the files as currently saved
7. If you want to do this just display all the available columns, I don’t do this by default as its a bit overwhelming and most customers aren’t that interested in these columns (at least when they start using Jaikoz). Of course many applications such as iTunes just save chnages as they are made without giving any option to review the changes.
8. You can elect not to overwrite fields, But you can’t direct to not split over release, the best ting to do in this case would be correct your metadata so that the songs are not split.
9. Yes already on enhancement list
10. Ok, added to enhancement list
11. It is available as ‘Playing Time’ in Manual Match from Musicbrainz, but cautious about adding to edit tab because not editable.
12. Added to list
13. Interesting idea, have to think about it.
14. Yes I would love to do this, but Musicbrainz don’t really allow this at the moment -although this might change. But not you can submit Puid/Musicbrainz pairs and genres.

[mjw]

1. True. It’s not a major point, but a low priority improvement.
   3a. I personally find that the View Pane is not a very effective way of quickly reviewing changes and would prefer an in-place F12 approach.

3b. If you dont want values to be overwritten you can set this on a column by column basis in Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format and Format2 when updating from Musicbrainz and Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs

I do have the Preferences/Musicbrainz/Format options set to “Fill this field only if it is empty” for all fields but still after running AutoCorrect, a number of fields are still changing content and colour to purple. Fields that change include Album, TrackNo, Genre and AlbumArtist and possibly others that I haven’t been able to detect yet. Can this be fixed?

I guess that what I would also really like is the ability to Revert individually selected cells without having to revert every cell on the row
4. Do you think you can fix this for Linux? I have found out today that this affects WMA and M4A tracks which is most of my collection
6. When I tried this a couple of days ago it matched the MB release but could not get the associated artwork. It seems not to have a MusicIP Id. I think this may be caused by the fingerprinting issue on that is not working on Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit.
8. See 3a.
9. Jaikoz is certainly doing much better than most taggers when it comes to reviewing changes before saving so credit where credit is due! But even if I display all available columns, I still wont see PlayingTime and some of the other in the “View Audio” tab in the View Pane. Also, if I add all fields then they will not fit on the width of 1 screen and a scrollbar will become necessary. This would really impact the efficiency of the reviewing of changes. What I am looking for is some means of being able to quickly identify the complete list of meta data field names that Jaikoz will change if I elect to save. That way I can get some comfort that no good data is being trashed behind the scenes. This happened to me when I tried Picard - it silently trashed all my embedded album art within my WMA files and I didn’t find out until my Sonos player didn’t display and art any more
13. As mentioned in 9, this is an essential field to look at to detect the most common cases where the wrong MB Id has been assigned. So if you can add it read-only then that would be very much appreciated.
16. I think the concern of the MB people is that users will submit poor quality data and it will overwhelm their review process. Perhaps these concerns could be addressed by also adding a second API which allows Taggers to tell MusicBrainz each time a user overwrites their local meta data using the remote meta data from a particular MB Id. This could be considered as a “vote” by the user that the quality of the meta data is good. This would then provide a feedback loop that would give the MB guys some confidence that meta data that has been reviewed by many people. It also wouldn’t increase the burden on the current review process. At some point you could even include the ability for users to modify/enhance existing remote meta data in MB.

[paultaylor]

3a. The F12 approach is a good idea that I might add (whilst keeping the View Pane)
3b. Ah this is because there are also a seperate Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs settings. They are kept seperate because by default changes from Musicbrainz overwrite fields, whereas changes from Discogs just fill in empty fields. (UPdates from Discogs can occur when the Url Discogs Release field has a value)
You can revert individual cells, select the cells, right click and select Edit/Undo
4. Not in the short term.
6. If you have a musicbrainz id then it should be able to get the artwork UNLESS the amazon artwork is stored in non-standard url, Ill check this one out (The MusicIP id is irellevant for getting artwork)
9. But playing time is not a field that Jaikoz can change, in fact it can’t change any of the fields that are displayed in the View Audio tab.
13. I an see your point but not that keen on doing this, will ponder.
16. Yes, hopefully this will change at some point.

[mjw]

[quote=paultaylor]3a. The F12 approach is a good idea that I might add (whilst keeping the View Pane)
[/quote]
That would be tremendous. Thanks.

3b. Ah this is because there are also a seperate Preferences/Remote Correct/Discogs settings. They are kept seperate because by default changes from Musicbrainz overwrite fields, whereas changes from Discogs just fill in empty fields. (UPdates from Discogs can occur when the Url Discogs Release field has a value)

I looked at my Discogs preferences and they also are set to only fill when empty, so I still don’t understand why Jaikoz is changing those fields (or at least marking them purple until I save)?

You can revert individual cells, select the cells, right click and select Edit/Undo

Thanks for pointing out. “Undo” indeed does 50% of what I would like the F12 key to do. The other 50% would be to perform a “Redo” on the selected cell(s). Then that way “Toggle” (F12) would just quickly flip the selected cells back and forth so you could see the changes. While you’re at it, key mappings for undo (crtl-z) and redo (crtl-y) would be useful too.

4. Not in the short term.

OK, I will try to use Windows. Perhaps you could update the issues list (http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/issues/start.jsp) to note this problem on Linux?

6. If you have a musicbrainz id then it should be able to get the artwork UNLESS the amazon artwork is stored in non-standard url, Ill check this one out (The MusicIP id is irellevant for getting artwork)

Thx

9. But playing time is not a field that Jaikoz can change, in fact it can’t change any of the fields that are displayed in the View Audio tab.

OK, so if I’m understanding you correctly - Say for example I have a track in my collection with an incorrect PlayingTime of 2:05, and Jaikoz matches it to a track in MB with a PlayingTime of 4:40. Even if my local data is wrong, Jaikoz has no way to make and save an update that field?

Also, regarding setting of preferences to Only Update Empty Fields, I am still confused and need something clarified. If I have set Jaikoz to Only Update Empty Fields for Title and Album and Jaikoz matches a track to a MB track with a different Title and Album field I notice that the GUI DOES change the colour of the cells to Purple (which indicates change) regardless of my preference settings. Are you saying that this highlighting is misleading and that in actually fact the changes are never written to disk when I save?

My main concern is to have complete transparency around what Jaikoz might be changing/adding especially for tags that I cannot see via the Jaikoz UI or where the UI might be misleading.
[/quote]

13. I an see your point but not that keen on doing this, will ponder.

I guess my need for this really depends on your answers to the previous question. If indeed Jaikoz can never change these fields, then I guess they could be excluded from the main table after all. When doing a Manual Lookup I have since realised that the first row in the popup window shows the current tag values in my collection so at least the info in displayed there. It just wasn’t clear to me initially that the first row was local data and all the other rows were remote data. I’m not sure if this is doable, but it would have been clearer to me that the first row is local data if the first line in the popup did not have a radio button next to it or if perhaps the first row was placed separately just above the title row in the table.

[Alfg]

Thanks for pointing out. “Undo” indeed does 50% of what I would like the F12 key to do. The other 50% would be to perform a “Redo” on the selected cell(s). Then that way “Toggle” (F12) would just quickly flip the selected cells back and forth so you could see the changes. While you’re at it, key mappings for undo (crtl-z) and redo (crtl-y) would be useful too.

This is a good idea

When doing a Manual Lookup I have since realised that the first row in the popup window shows the current tag values in my collection so at least the info in displayed there. It just wasn’t clear to me initially that the first row was local data and all the other rows were remote data. I’m not sure if this is doable, but it would have been clearer to me that the first row is local data if the first line in the popup did not have a radio button next to it or if perhaps the first row was placed separately just above the title row in the table.

Same happend to me. When I tried a manual match, I was always looking for the playtime of my song in the AudioView-window, but there I didn’t see which original song it was, so I had to remember the line number of this song in the Edit-Window and look up that line number in the ViewAudio-window. In Jaikoz 3.3.4 these original meta-data have a gray background, now I know what this means

Also, regarding setting of preferences to Only Update Empty Fields, I am still confused and need something clarified. If I have set Jaikoz to Only Update Empty Fields for Title and Album and Jaikoz matches a track to a MB track with a different Title and Album field I notice that the GUI DOES change the colour of the cells to Purple (which indicates change) regardless of my preference settings. Are you saying that this highlighting is misleading and that in actually fact the changes are never written to disk when I save?

@mjw, when you use Autocorrect, have you changed the tasks inside? If no, then the changes in the title- and album-fields might be from the task “Local correct Album” and “Local correct Title” and these changes will be saved!!

[paultaylor]

I looked at my Discogs preferences and they also are set to only fill when empty, so I still don’t understand why Jaikoz is changing those fields (or at least marking them purple until I save)? Also, regarding setting of preferences to Only Update Empty Fields, I am still confused and need something clarified. If I have set Jaikoz to Only Update Empty Fields for Title and Album and Jaikoz matches a track to a MB track with a different Title and Album field I notice that the GUI DOES change the colour of the cells to Purple (which indicates change) regardless of my preference settings. Are you saying that this highlighting is misleading and that in actually fact the changes are never written to disk when I save?

I think Alfg is correct, thx Alfg

OK, I will try to use Windows. Perhaps you could update the issues list (http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/issues/start.jsp) to note this problem on Linux?

Yes, it is a little out of date.

OK, so if I’m understanding you correctly - Say for example I have a track in my collection with an incorrect PlayingTime of 2:05, and Jaikoz matches it to a track in MB with a PlayingTime of 4:40. Even if my local data is wrong, Jaikoz has no way to make and save an update that field?

That’s correct because its not a simple metadata field, its actually calculated from the audio data itself, so is correct (unless the audio data is corrupt in some way)

[mjw]

Alfg was indeed correct. Now I just have 4 tasks remaining in my AutoCorrector Tasks:

1. Correct Tags from MB
2. Update Tags from existing Discogs Ids
3. Correct Lyrics
4. Cluster Albums

This is getting closer to what I want since it allows me to enrich my meta data using MB and Discogs without changing any of my existing meta data (which might be correct in some cases).

Now if Paul can implement the F12 functionality, I’ll be able to re-enable the settings to allow MB and Discogs to change existing fields and I’ll be able to review those changes easily before Saving. This will allow me to safely improve the meta data for a good portion of my collection.

[Alfg]

I agree