SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Jaikoz or SongKong: Which is Right for Me?

Hello Paul. Recently, I have been considering purchasing an automated audio file tagger for my music collection, and while looking at the options which are available to me from different companies, I learned about Jaikoz and SongKong.

I was reading a comment in another section of your forum – I don’t remember where now – and I have a few questions regarding your two products. Answering these questions will assist me in determining whether or not Jaikoz or SongKong is right for me. You wrote as follows:

The other key difference is that matching with SongKong does
not require you to check the modifications before saving
because songs are saved as matched but the changes can be
rolled back easily at a alter stage - even after restarting
your computer. (And you get a very detailed report showing
exactly what has been changed)

Does rolling back the changes revert the metadata of one’s entire music collection at once, or does this option allow a person to select an individual song – or perhaps a group of songs – and then just roll back the changes that were made to that song, or songs? In other words, does the roll back mean all or nothing at all, or can changes be made to specific songs entry by entry?

I couldn’t help but notice that there is no large Excel-like spreadsheet with the SongKong demo, as occurs with the Jaikoz demo. I found the Jaikoz spreadsheet format to be very informative, and I would hope that SongKong has one as well.

In absence of such a spreadsheet, does this mean that an individual song or album metadata cannot be manually edited/corrected if SongKong should make some mistakes, as it appears can be done with Jaikoz?

SongKong also allows you to monitor a folder and fix songs
as folders are added to that folder.

That is a very nice feature. Does Jaikoz likewise possess the ability to monitor a folder, or perhaps even multiple folders which are located on different parts of one’s hard drive?

SongKong also has more advanced Delete Duplicates options
and some additional Fix Songs options but these are all
planned to be added to Jaikoz.

Oh gosh! And to think that I just purchased Dupe Away a day ago! Have the aforementioned options been added yet to Jaikoz? If not, how soon do you anticipate adding them?

This has probably been suggested to you before, but have you ever considered combining the features of both of your programs into just one powerful app? It seems to me that having just one program with all of the functionality would be a lot easier for your end users. It would certainly help to avoid the current confusion that some of us experience when trying to decide which of the two apps is best for us. And, of course, it would give users everything they need in one solid program.

Let me also mention that while you suggest in a few of your comments that some people may be interested in purchasing both programs in order to meet all of their tagging needs, I hope you understand that this is not possible for all of us.

In my case, I happen to be a retired old man who lives on a fixed income, so watching my pennies is very important to me. In fact, I am really not even a regular music listener. The whole reason why I became interested in your products is because I recently became engaged in a project for my newborn granddaughter. I have been collecting some songs to use with SoundSpectrum’s amazing G-Force visualizer. The music, bright colors and constantly-changing patterns attract her attention, and will help her to develop her eye coordination, head movement, attention skills, etc. It was while expanding this music collection for her that I realized the need for an app such as yours.

Anyway, as of today, I still haven’t made a decision regarding which program I am going to purchase, or from which online company I will buy it, so your responses will hopefully help to steer me in the right direction.

Thank you.

SongKong only rolls back changes for the songs/folder selected, no need to rollback changes for all songs.

No SongKongs aim is full automated matching and therefore dopes not provide a way to make manual modifications. SongKong does provide plenty of options on how songs are matched and formatted so you should be able to configure SongKong to do exactly what you want, and therefore manual editing rarely needed. But if it is you could use Jaikoz or another application.

No Jaikoz does not. SongKong works on songs as a pipeline of songs whereas with Jaikoz you load your songs into Jaikoz first and then start working on them so it doesnt really fit into the Jaikoz way of doing things.

Currently you can just modify one folder with SongKong but plan to support monitoing multiple folders.

Jaikoz was originally developed a few years ago, and the aim was to offer a very flexible program that did everything, including automated tagging and manual tagging.

But it has come clear to me over the years that whilst this was great for some customers, there were other customers looking for something much simpler to use, additionally automated matching has got better and can now be better utilized. So Songkong aims to be easy to use and give results quickly, I wouldnt like to add additional complexity to SongKong
so the applications will remain separate.

Of course, and most users will find that just one of the applications will meet their requirements…[/quote]

Hello Paul. Thanks for your email response, as well as your response here.

As you no doubt already realized, I purchased SongKong standard shortly after reading your above response. I have been testing it out and learning how it works, and what results different options give, over the past few days.

I have a question, as well as two suggestions.

Question: In the “Errors” section of the generated report, the error messages end with a code such as this:

Unable to retrieve an acoustic id for song 16,928 file . . . because {2}

I looked in the built-in help, and there is nothing regarding the significance of the error codes. Can you please provide a list of what they each mean, and also consider adding the list to the built-in help section?

Suggestion#1: On the renaming tab, there is an empty section. For those of us who are slow at these things, it would be nice if that empty space could be used to display an example of exactly what kind of title each option will produce.

In other words, each time a user clicks on one of the options, the text in that empty section will display what the song title will look like with that particular option is chosen.

Suggestion #2: There are a number of different Mac apps which will retrieve song lyrics. I was using the free app called “Get Lyrical” for a few days until I discovered another free app called “LyricsFinder”.

The advantage of LyricsFinder is that unlike “Get Lyrical” and other apps, it doesn’t wait until you are actually playing a song before it searches for the lyrics. You can drop a folder, or your entire music collection on it, and it will go to town on all of them, without having to play them first.

But the thing is, that means having yet another app open on your computer sucking up more CPU power. It would be nice if fetching lyrics could be built right into both Jaikoz and SongKong.

Thanks !

The {2} is actually placeholder for a message, i.e instead of saying {2} it should show a message, but for some reason didnt have tone to show so its a minor bug.

You are right we should add example output for the masks.

Whilst I would like to add lyrics support there legal issues with getting lyrics making it difficult to do so at the moment.

So can that minor bug be fixed so that we have an idea regarding why an ID couldn’t be obtained?

Regarding lyrics, yes, from what I have read during the past few days, it appears that it is becoming more difficult to even find websites which offer song lyrics.

That has to be commercialism at its worst.

As you know, for decades, lyrics were plastered all over album covers, in album booklets, on CD jackets, etc. Now it seems that greedy merchants want to suck the last drop of blood out of the beet. Truly sad.

[quote=GrampsAudio]So can that minor bug be fixed so that we have an idea regarding why an ID couldn’t be obtained?
[/quote]
Yes of course