Sorry, Paul, but I think there’s a connection between Jaikoz 3.6.0 (and under certain circumstances, 3.5.1 - see below) and the reported Artwork/Chinese character corruption issues (referred to here as just ‘corruption’).
I’ve used Jaikoz 3.5.0 on Win7 for a couple of months to manually clean up album art on hundreds of albums. I really like the way Win7 displays the artwork on the file and folder icons in the Large Icon view. When Jaikoz 3.5.1 came out, I just automatically upgraded - no problems.
[Aside - When I completed the clean up of my music library a few weeks ago, I turned my attention to another, unrelated task - chopping up large 8-9 GB MPEG-2 files of converted home videos into individual scenes. For anyone trying to this, I highly recommend HandySaw DS. It has literally saved me months of painstaking effort.]
A few days ago, I added music to my library and needed to fix up some of the album art. I opened Jaikoz, gleefully upgraded to the new version 3.6.0, and started to work. To my surprise, I found that when I tried to delete/update the artwork in an MP3 file, Win7 showed a default music icon, not the artwork. When I looked at the file properties, there were Chinese characters in the track title. I noticed that sometimes the corruption would impact other fields, such as Genre or Track# (which would be blank). This was very disappointing and aggravating since every file I touched with Jaikoz while trying to troubleshoot the problem became irreversibly corrupted.
I sent Paul Taylor an e-mail about the problems I had encountered, and he nicely replied:
[quote]HI, this is a bug in Windows 7 but I havent actually tested against
Windows 7 so Im not hundred percent sure of the issue, but I dont think
it understands tags properly, there are some posts on the issue on the
forum http://www.jthink.net/jaikozforum/posts/list/1319.page . I should
be testing against Windows 7 very soon then I can give you a more
comprehensive answer.[/quote]
I reviewed all of the various postings on the Jaikoz forum regarding Windows 7 issues. I was not satisfied with what I read, because my experience with Win7 had been flawless up until recently. I wanted to know what had changed on my system that was now causing me to experience these corruption issues. Even before I contacted Paul, I had tried uninstalling 3.6.0 and reinstalling 3.5.0 and 3.5.1, both of which had worked fine for me under Win7. Given Paul’s response, and what I had read on the forum, I wanted to find out what else had changed on my system to cause the corruption. Was it a recent Windows Update patch, or some interaction with HandySaw DS (which was the only software I had installed since last running Jaikoz successfully)?
I decided to use VMware Workstation 7.1 to test my working theory that something had changed on my system that was now causing the corruption. I started by installing Jaikoz 3.6.0 in a VM with a clean install of Windows XP. My test was very simple - In Jaikoz, delete artwork from an MP3 file (or copy artwork from another file), save it, and look at the results in Win7. I was using a shared folder in VMware, so it was easy to have the VM update a file, and then either copy the file to a mapped Win7 folder, or just update the file in a shared Win7 folder directly, then go to the Win7 host and view the results in Windows Explorer.
I found that Jaikoz 3.6.0 under WinXP still produced the corruption when viewed in Win7 when I performed my simple test.
I then tried a VM with a clean install of Windows 7 and installed Jaikoz 3.6.0. Same result --> corruption.
To make a long story a little shorter, I have tried installing Jaikoz 3.5.0, 3.5.1 and 3.6.0 under different scenarios of clean Win7 and WinXP VM’s, with the following easily reproducible results:
[b]Clean install of Jaikoz 3.5.0 --> No corruption
Upgrade from Jaikoz 3.5.0 to 3.5.1 --> No corruption
Upgrade from Jaikoz 3.5.1 to 3.6.0 --> Corruption!
Clean install of Jaikoz 3.5.1 --> Corruption!
Clean install if Jaikoz 3.6.0 --> Corruption!
Uninstall Jaikoz after any of the above corruptions and reinstalling 3.5.0 --> Corruption!
Uninstall Jaikoz and Java after corruption and reinstall 3.5.0 --> Corruption![/b]
This last part is particularly disturbing, because my desire is get Jaikoz 3.5.0 working again on my Win7 host machine, but I have currently been unsuccessful at completely removing Jaikoz so that I could revert back to a clean install of Jaikoz 3.5.0 without corruption.
Paul, if you could just help me do this successfully, I would be a very happy camper!
Also note that the corruption occurs even when Jaikoz is running under Windows XP, you just can’t ‘see’ the corruption until you transfer the files to a Window 7 environment.
'Hope this helps.