Jaikoz is a powerful mp3 tag editor. Automation is provided by the MusicBrainz database. The license fee appears reasonably priced at �15, �1.50 of which goes to MusicBrainz.
Usability: Jaikoz performs the basic manual editing properties well. Support for more complex editing (e.g. genre, album art) is pretty poor. Getting to grip with the advanced features is quite a challenge (although on occasions worth the effort) and some of the functionality is rather counter-intuitive. For example understanding what actions are performed by “auto correct” is quite important, but difficult to grasp. A quick start guide and a shorter manual would be of benefit, but most certainly not a substitute for better design.
Performance: Jaikoz is resource hungry and requirements increase linearly based on the number of files loaded. Jaikoz recommends a minimum of 512mb of RAM, although this seems insufficient in my experience for even a modest music collection. Lots of memory is more important than processing power.
Reliability: Poor. In my opinion Jaikoz should be classed as beta. I base this decision having tagged my music collection using Jaikoz and encountered two major bugs and several annoyances, see for example:
http://www.jaikoz.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/812.page
(cause of the above http://www.jaikoz.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/795.page)
http://www.jaikoz.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/819.page
http://www.jaikoz.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/808.page
Although MusicBrainz is independent, I will mention it here as I am funding its running. In my experience the MusicBrainz server is terrible.
Support: Paul seems to be doing an excellent job!
Closing remarks. I consider Jaikoz to be a good example of beta release software. On these ground I do not feel the license fee is presently justifiable. Having said that Jaikoz has the potential to be a wonderful piece of software. However, I wonder if the current licensing model will thwart development. I would love to see Jaikoz becoming open source. Developers world-wide will no doubt collaborate to deliver a truly brilliant package. A income stream can still be obtained from open source software by licensing server side access – e.g. MusicBrainz and/or other server side services.