Whats going to be in Jaikoz 4.0 ?

With 3.9.0 out the door its time to think about the next release. I'm hopeful that the long delayed Musicbrainz NGS will be released soon, and if that is the case Jaikoz will be updated to use the much improved webservice to give better and faster results. Musicbrainz NGS is a massive Musicbrainz release so I think it fitting that Jaikoz gets a major release number to reflect this.

Also Musicbrainz NGS provides an way to semi-automatically add new releases. So within Jaikoz you'll be able to select a group of songs and select 'Add to Musicbrainz' . this will open up a Musicbrainz webpage with everything filled in, so you just have to check the info,add in anything extra you know and okay it. This is another way to really help improve the Musicbrainz Community Database and continue to provide a via alternative to closed databases such as Gracenotes.

Itunes is still the way the majority of users play their music so I'm going to make some further improvements to the iTunes integration to better handle when iTunes is set to copy and re-organise your music files. Windows users have not been been able to update iTunes using Java 64bit because of a problem with the Java COM library I use but I have found an alternative so I will rewrite the Windows iTunes support to use this instead.

Jaikoz in the dock or toolbar doesn't react to having files dropped on it, but this is now possible to do.

Manual Tag from Musicbrainz is due an overhaul and I'm expecting to replace this with a more album orientated one.

There has been a long running debate on shortcut keys. My feeling is that I'm going to simplify shortcut keys so that they always only work on the selected items, whereas currently there is one combination to apply to the selected item and another to apply to all visible in the window. Because the resulting shortcut keys will require less keys, and there will be less shortcuts to remember I think this is an improvement. It will be easy to work on all songs in the edit view by use of Cmd-A/Cntl-A or newly added Select All option. I'm also going to look again at customizable shortcut keys and toolbars.

When matching from AmpliFIND we only take the Acoustic Id, trouble is that if that Acoustic Id is not known to Musicbrainz and your song has no other metadata we cant get a match. AmpliFIND actaully has other basic data such as artist and song title so we should use this if our song doesn't contain the info, this might be enough to do a metadata match against Musicbrainz.

So that is the thinking at the moment

Songbird buggy and they dont seem to care

In Jaikoz 3.8.3 a user was complaining that Jaikoz couldn't open their mp4s. Turns out the problem was that they had been edited in Songbird, and Songbird save track no differently to every other mp4 player I ve tried.

I added a workaround to Jaikoz and raised a bug with the Songbird team.

A little time passed, they linked it to another issue which wasn't the same problem and then they just closed it. I complained and reopened it because nothing had been fixed, and now they have downgraded it to a suggestion for a future release. Because Apple have not written a nice neat specification, it is acceptable for the Songbird developers to ddclare no bug. I really hate it when developers bend over backwards to try and show there not at fault rather then trying to resolve the issue.

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