LostInTechnology

The Ins and Outs of Jaikoz Audio File Meta Data Program

Posted on 06. Apr, 2009 by LesliePoston in Apple, Software

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I am a Mac junkie, and a music lover. I have over 80GB of music, most of which I’ve imported from records, cassettes and CDs that I own. This means that much of my collection had issues with tags, missing album art and more meta data problems than you could shake a stick at. Then a friend recommended Jaikoz to me and I must say that it has made me a very happy girl.

Overview

Jaikoz starts off on the right foot by being available on more than just the Mac OS. Available for Macintosh, Windows and Linux, this program is ready to help any user get more out of their audio files. The user interface does leave a little bit to be desired, I admit. As a Mac junkie, I’m spoiled and expect all of my Mac compatible programs to be as pretty to look at and intuitive to use as everything else for my Mac. Jaikoz will require you to read the manual, and that’s not a bad thing.

Favorite Features

Perhaps my favorite feature of Jaikoz is the music lyrics feature. Sure, it finds missing album art, it fixes incorrect tags, it adds missing tags, and hits a total of 72 meta data points that you would other wise have to manually handle file by file in iTunes. But the lyrics have been the most fun feature for me.

Jaikoz works with the MusicBrainz library as well as the Acoustic ID data provided by MusicIP. This means that it catches songs that have no data at all in its net. By the time it’s done running your library will be close to complete, though it did miss a few things for me. Regardless, that meant I only had to do a handful of tagging by hand, as opposed to thousands and thousands of songs.

Jaikoz includes too many features to be covered here, so you can check out the entire list on the Jaikoz web site.

Trial and Paid Options

Jaikoz offers a free trial, but it is well worth the purchase price of £15. That gets you upgrades for life, which is a great deal, and the developer is very responsive to feedback and questions. I had the most success doing my songs 2000 at a time (yes, I have that much music). This meant the project stretched over several days, but it went off without a hitch once I applied the advice from the manual to what I was doing (of course I tried it without reading the manual the first time, wouldn’t you?).

Shortcomings

Things to look out for include overloading the program. I had glitches and difficulty when I exceeded 2000 files at a time. When reducing the number of files the program was working on, it went flawlessly. Also, deleting duplicates is still a feature best done by hand. Much like Daupin, Jaikoz also tends to catch what I call “legitimate duplicates” in its net when sorting, such as valid different versions of one song. It kept trying to tell me “Fully Alive” by Flyleaf was duplicated when in fact one version was acoustic and one was plugged in, for example.

Conclusion

I highly recommend giving the free trial a try and seeing if it’s a fit for you. It can save you mass amounts of time updating and tagging your music library and makes the difference from hours of doing it by hand. I also like how the UI (user interface) has improved over the months I’ve been using it. Each of the (frequent) upgrades makes it look a bit better and become a bit easier and more comprehensive to use.

(By) Leslie Poston is a writer, social media guide and tech junkie. In addition to writing about all things tech, she conducts social media training sessions to help you bring your company into World 2.0 using social media and technology and is the founder of Uptown Uncorked.

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Tags: Apple, audio, itunes, jaikoz, linux, Mac, mp3, vista