Hi, I bought Jaikoz a few months ago in anticipation of my big CD-ripping project. I’ve ripped my collection in the past but was to inferior-bitrate mp3. I decided that since HDD space is now dirt cheap I would do it “right” and rip everything to FLAC files.
My workflow up until now was to use XLD on the Mac to do the ripping. I meticulously chose 500x500 album art for everything at that time, and I saved logs and cue files for every album so I can easily re-create each one if necessary. For metadata I decided to use Gracenote (via iTunes, XLD can read the Gracenote tags once iTunes recognizes the disc). I figured since Apple uses Gracenote it must be pretty good.
Ugh. The only good thing I can say about Gracenote is that it recognized every single one of my 1000 CDs–even some of the really obscure stuff. So at least I don’t have any albums called “Unknown Artist - Unknown Album” etc. But I am definitely not happy with many of the tags–there are plenty of spelling errors and some weird syntax. But what bugs me most of all is total lack of consistency (like two discs of a 2CD album will be named totally differently so disc 2 doesn’t appear directly under disc 1, etc.
This is where I hope Jaikoz can come into play. I want it to look up each album on Musicbrainz and modify the tags accordingly.
I feel like a lot of Jaikoz users have folders full of single tracks, some mis-named, some not named at all, and want to make some sense of them. In my case, all of my albums are identified and complete, I’m just anal-retentive and want tags that look consistent.
So I tried to run “autocorrect” on my library tonight. Aside from exceeding the number of lookups on MB/discogs it seemed to identify most of my music. But I noticed that sometimes it tagged files within a particular album differently. For example, I ripped Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” CD and after it was ripped the album name on every track was “Bachelor No. 2”. After Jaikoz Autocorrect it renamed the album tag on the first 7 tracks as “Bachelor No. 2 EP” and then the rest of the tracks as “Bachelor No. 2, or the Last Remains of the Dodo”.
That is bad! Obviously I haven’t saved any of the changes at this point–mainly just wanted to see what I was going to get. Is there any way to tell Jaikoz to treat everything within a folder as a complete album and to keep genre, album, album artist, release year, etc. tags consistent for every track in the album?
Genres are also a complete mess–and I thought the Gracenote ones were bad. There’s a Yanni album (go ahead and laugh, it’s ok) that jaikoz genre tagged as “Pop Metal”. Not to mention other weirdness like 10,000 Maniacs “In My Tribe” album being tagged as “Rock” (I would consider them folk rock, but that’s fine) with the exception of track 9 which it tagged as “Soft Rock”. WTF?
I’m not sure if the weird genres are coming from Musicbrainz or discogs (or both?) but in any case it’s not good. I might just tag them by hand unless someone has a better suggestion?
It would help a lot though if there was some way to set Jaikoz not to allow varying album and genre tags within a specific folder. The Gracenote tags I have now may have errors and not maintain consistent style, but at least they are consistent among all the tracks within an album.
Sorry for the length of this, but I’m really hoping Jaikoz can be set up to function properly for people like me whose music is all in the form of self-ripped, complete albums. Any other Jaikoz users in my boat with any tips to share?
Thanks for any comments.