Using JuK
Here's a screenshot of JuK
Screenshot of JuK in action.
JuK maintains a list of all files that it knows about. This is called the Collection List. The collection list is specific to JuK and is not shared with other applications.
Independent of the Collection List, are playlists. You can have as many playlists as you want. You can use JuK created playlists with other media players (such as or xmms) and you can manage playlists created in those applications from within JuK.
You can add files to the Collection List individually, using File Open ... and selecting them from a standard file dialog. You can add entire folders using File Manage Folders.... Folders added this way will be rescanned every time you start JuK. You can even define folders inside these folders that will be excluded from scan. You can force the folders to be rescanned by right-clicking on the Collection List icon, and selecting Reload.
Adding a song to a playlist will automatically add its file to the Collection List, but adding a file to the Collection List won't automatically add the song to any playlists.
You can quickly create a playlist from your entire Collection List, by clicking on the Collection List icon, and choosing Duplicate. The resulting playlist is a normal playlist, and editing it will not affect the Collection List.
You can add playlist files created outside JuK individually by selecting them with File Open .... Any playlist files found in folders you add with File Manage Folders... will also be added automatically.
You can create a new empty playlist, a search playlist or a playlist from a folder by choosing File New or the New icon on the toolbar. You will be prompted for a name, and then an icon for that playlist will appear in the playlist pane. You can now drag and drop files from the Collection List, or from other playlists, to your playlist. Use the Save icon or File Save to save the playlist at any time.

The Song List
When you are viewing the Collection List, the main pane contains all the files that JuK knows about. When you are viewing a playlist, only the songs that are in that playlist are shown. In either case, the appearance and behavior of the list is the same.
Each song takes one row in the display. There is a column for each metadata field that JuK tracks. These columns correspond to the fields available to edit in the tag editor.
You can reorder the list at any time by clicking on the column header. This will first sort the files in ascending order based on the contents of that column. If you click again on the same header, the files will be re-sorted in descending order.
The columns are initially sized wide enough to show the longest entry available. You can resize the columns by placing your mouse cursor on the divider between two columns. When the cursor changes from a pointer, click and drag in the direction you want to resize the columns.
You can reorder the columns by clicking on a header and dragging the header to the left or right. You cannot drag past the edge of the window when doing this however, so you may need to scroll a little to the left or right, and repeat dragging the header, until you have placed it in your preferred position.
You can hide or unhide columns by clicking on a column header, and clicking on the name of the column to change.
double clicking on a file will play it with the built-in player. If another song was already playing, it will stop, and the new song will play.
clicking on a file offers you several options:
Add to Play Queue 	 This will start playing the file as soon as the current song is over. If no song is playing, the file will be played when you next hit the Play button. If you have already chosen the Add to Play Queue option on a different file, then this file will override that selection.
Cut 	Copy 	Paste 	 ...
Remove from Playlist 	 If you are viewing the Collection List, choosing this action will remove the file from the list, and will also remove all corresponding entries for this song from all playlists. You should note that if this file is in a folder that JuK scans on startup, it will be readded to the Collection List the next time you start up JuK but it won't be automatically added to any playlists.
If you are viewing a playlist, Remove from Playlist will simply remove the song from the playlist.
Edit Column Title 	 Will allow you to edit the currently highlighted song, in the column you clicked in. For example, if you do not have the tag editor visible, and you are busy creating a playlist, but you notice a mis-spelling in an artist name, you can edit it directly with this menu item.
Changes made in this manner are always saved immediately as soon as you click elsewhere and are finished editing.
This menu item will be disabled if JuK detects that the track you have selected is read-only.
Refresh 	 This will reload the tag information of the selected files, in case the files have been changed while JuK was running.
Delete 	 This will remove the file from the Collection List, remove all entries for the song in all playlists, and delete the file from your disk. You cannot undo this, although you will be asked to confirm your choice. Use this with caution.
Guess Tag Information 	 This will make JuK try to guess information such as the Artist and Title of a song. JuK employs different methods of guessing:
From File Name 	JuK will try to guess the tags of the song based on its filename. For example, a song name such as Roxette - You've Got the Look.mp3 would guess Roxette for the artist and You've Got the Look as the title. You can adjust the way JuK guesses for tags by selecting Settings Tag Guesser..., which will open the Tag Guesser dialog. JuK will not replace tags that it did not guess from the file name.
From Internet 	JuK will try to guess the tags of the song by using the MusicBrainz program. You must have MusicBrainz installed for this command to work.
Rename File 	 This will rename the selected files to conform to a given format. You must choose the way you want the files renamed first by selecting Settings File Renamer.... The resulting name of each file is based on its metadata tags. For example, the Ogg Vorbis song The Theme (Metroid) by Stemage could result in /usr/share/music/Stemage/The Theme (Metroid).ogg.
Create Playlist From Selected Items 	 This allows you to quickly create a playlist from songs in your Collection List. This function will prompt you for a name for the new playlist, and will then insert all of the songs that are selected into the new playlist.
Add Selected Items to Audio or Data CD 	 This allows you to quickly create a K3b -burning project from your selected songs. JuK will ask you if you would like an Audio project or a Data project, unless K3b already has a project open.
If K3b is not already running, JuK will start it up for you. After that, JuK will add your selected files to the current K3b project. You can then save the project in K3b for burning later, or burn the right away.

JuK Playlists
A playlist is simply a collection of songs grouped by some category. For example, you may have a playlist of songs that you listen to while coding, while trying to sleep, or even when you need a laugh. JuK supports several different types of playlists.
Normal playlists 	 This is the most common kind of playlist. It is a playlist composed of files, just like the Collection List.
The history playlist 	 If you enable this playlist (by enabling View Show History, this playlist will record every song that JuK plays. The playlist will have an extra column, Time, which records the exact time and date the song played. The playlist doesn't start tracking the history until it is enabled, however.
Search playlists 	 This is a playlist which is based off of a search. You can create a playlist like this by clicking File New Search Playlist, or by clicking on the Search Playlist button on the toolbar.
After creating this playlist, it will keep track of which songs in the Collection List match your criteria, and automatically update itself accordingly whenever the Collection List changes.
Playlists are organized in the Playlist pane, which is the vertical bar at the left. In this pane is an icon for every playlist you have. There are different view mode for this pane, which can be selected from the View View Modes menu.
Default View mode 	 This is the default view mode. In this mode, all the playlists are shown as large icons, one above the other in the view mode.
Compact View mode 	 This mode is similar to the Normal Viewmode, with the exception that the playlists are represented with horizontal bars with small icons instead of with square boxes.
Tree View mode 	 This mode is the most powerful. This mode is just like the Compact viewmode, except that the Collection List is now the root of a tree of virtual playlists. The Collection List has three children nodes, Artist, Album, and Genre. Each of these node has children representing all of the entries from that specific category. For example, if your Collection List contains music from 4 different artists, you would have 4 entries under the artist node.
One nifty feature of the tree view mode is something called drag-and-drop retagging. Simply select some files in the track list, and drag them onto one of the artist, album, or genre nodes under Collection List. The songs will automatically be retagged to match the item you dropped the tracks on. For example, if you drag a group of tracks onto a Genre called "Rock", all of the tracks will be retagged will a Genre tag of Rock.

The JuK Tag Editor
For many file formats, it is practical to use the filename to describe the contents of the file: Report for the board - June 2003.doc for example, may be all the information you need in order to find that file again. Trying to capture all the useful information about a particular song however, could lead to filenames like this: Type O Negative - The Glorious Liberation Of The Peoples Technocratic Republic Of Vinnland By The Combined Forces Of The United Territories Of Europa.mp3 or Various Artists_15_The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz Volume II_Jimmie Lunceford & His Orchestra - Organ Grinder's Swing.mp3. These are neither very practical to use, nor do they contain all of the useful information that you might have collected about the song. Adding the album, and track number, for example, to the first would make it even longer and more unmanageable, while still not telling you at a glance the year it was released, or what style of music it is, if you're not familiar with the artist.
The solution then, is to store this kind of metadata inside the files themselves. Mp3 and ogg files can also contain small snippets of text which you can use to describe the content of the file. There are several formats, but JuK hides the details of the differences between them, and provides a standard way to edit a standard subset of well known tags for all your audio files.
JuK's full featured tag editor allows you to edit the tags in both mp3 and ogg files. You can edit single files or multiple files, and you can select a mix of mp3 and ogg files to edit. The only requirement is that you have write access to the files themselves; you cannot edit the tags of a file that is mounted from a for example.

Editing the Tags in a Single File
To edit the tag in a single file, select it in either the collection list or any entries it has in any playlist. If the tag editor is not visible, enable it by choosing View Show Tag Editor. The tag editor displays in the bottom of the list view.
Simply type into any of the editable fields to change the information. When you are done, click back in the list, and you will be prompted to save your changes.
You may find that the tag editor remains disabled when you've clicked on a file. This happens when JuK has detected that the track is read-only.

Tag Editor Fields
Artist Name: 	 The name of the Artist(s) who released the song.
Track name: 	 The name of the song.
Album name: 	 The name of the album the song was released on.
Genre: 	 The Style of the music. JuK provides a list corresponding roughly to the informal id3 standard, but you are free to type your own entries in this list.
File name: 	 The file name of the actual file on disk. You can edit this directly, and when you save, the file will be renamed.
Track: 	 The position of the track on the original recording.
Year: 	 The year the song was released.
Length: 	 This is not editable, it is simply shown for information.
Bitrate: 	 This is not editable, it is simply shown for information.
Comment: 	 You can add your own free text comment here, with additional notes
You can explicitly and immediately save your changes at any time using the Tagger Save menu entry or by pressing T.

Editing the Tags in Multiple Files
You can select multiple files in the list view, and edit one or more fields in the tags for all files at once.
Use and the to select a contiguous list of files, and and to select individual non-contiguous files.
If the tag editor is not visible, you can enable it by choosing View Show Tag Editor. The tag editor displays in the bottom of the list view.
The tag editor behaves slightly differently when you have selected multiple files.
Each field in the tag editor will now show an Enable check box next to it. Any field that has exactly the same contents for all the files you selected, displays that content, and is enabled for editing, with the Enable check box checked.
Any field that does not have matching contents in all selected files is not initially editable, and does not display any contents at all.
To change the content of any field, check the Enable check box if it is not already checked, and edit the field as you normally would.
When you are done, click back in the list view and you will be prompted to save your changes. The prompt dialog will show you a list of the affected files, so you have a chance to check that you are indeed altering the files you intended to.
You can explicitly and immediately save your changes at any time using the Tagger Save menu entry or by pressing T.

The Rename File dialog
The Rename File dialog
Screenshot of the Rename File dialog.
The File Renamer Configuration dialog box is used to configure the Rename File action, which renames a song's based on the information contained within its metadata tags.
The whole Rename File feature is used to get consistent file names for your music collection (including moving the files if necessary). For example you may have some songs which appear on disk as 01 - Title.mp3 if you got them from Amazon, while songs from OCRemix might be Ailsean- Mega_Man_3_Mega_Fire_(OC_Remix).mp3 or something along those lines.
Using the file renamer allows JuK to rename those songs to something sane on-disk, such as Ailsean - Mega Fire.mp3 and The Strokes - Reptilia.mp3. You can even include paths throughout to automatically sort the music (⪚ by year or album), like $HOME/Music/2003/The Strokes - Reptilia.mp3.
Doing this is as simple as activating the Rename File action, either from the Tagger menu, or right-clicking on the files. The default is the R shortcut. But before this is done you should setup how the files are to be renamed.
That is done from the above mentioned dialog that can be opened with Settings File Renamer... menu item. You can define a destination path, by using a base music folder and then adding pieces to there. These path pieces would be based on the music metadata such as song title, artist, , and are added using the Add Category selector.
Each "path piece" has a check box between it allowing a folder separator to be added.
The options for each piece, which simply control what happens if the appropriate metadata is empty, and allow a prefix/suffix when the entry is substituted in, can help you to make the renaming procedure more effective.

The Tag Guesser Configuration dialog
The Tag Guesser Configuration dialog
Screenshot of the Tag Guesser Configuration dialog.
The Tag Guesser Configuration dialog is used to configure the Guess from File Name action.
In the dialog you will see a list on the left of different filename scheme patterns. JuK includes an extensive set of defaults patterns to match most common filenaming styles. If you'd like to add a new scheme, click on the Add button, and type in your scheme and click on OK.
Here you can see the currently configured file name schemes which the tag editor uses to extract tag information from a file name. Each string may contain one of the following placeholders:
%t: Title
%A: Album
%a: Artist
%T: Track
%c: Comment
For example, the file name scheme [%T] %a - %t would match [01] Deep Purple - Smoke on the water but not (Deep Purple) Smoke on the water. For that second name, you would use the scheme (%a) %t.
JuK will try the schemes you have listed one at a time, starting at the top of the list. The first scheme which results in a match will be the scheme used to guess the song's tags. Some songs may match more than one scheme. You can make sure that the correct scheme matches first by selecting the scheme in the list box and then using the arrow buttons to move it to the top of the list.
You can also edit or remove a scheme from the list. Just select the scheme in the list, and use the Modify button to change the scheme, or the Remove button to remove the scheme from the list.

The Advanced Search dialog
The Advanced Search dialog
Screenshot of the Advanced Search Dialog.
The Advanced Search dialog is used to create Search Playlists. It allows you to make a fine-grained search among the different tags of your song collection.
At the top of the dialog, you can type in the name of your search playlist. Then, you can define your search criteria in the Search Criteria group.
The top of the Search Criteria group has two radio buttons, Match any of the following and Match all of the following. If you select Match any of the following, then a match by any of the conditions you define will include the song in the playlist. Otherwise, every condition you define must match in order to include the song in the playlist.
Below the radio buttons are the condition definitions. You can add more conditions by using the More button, and remove conditions by using the Fewer button. Any conditions you leave blank are ignored, so you do not have to use Fewer to eliminate empty conditions.
Every condition definition has three parts: The tag chooser list on the left, the matching style list on the right, and the search text in the middle. The tag chooser lets JuK know what tag you want to search for the text in. If you choose the special tag "<All Visible>", then any tag that you can see in the Collection List listing is fair game to match the search text.
The match style list lets JuK know which search method to use. The search methods you can use are as follows:
Normal Matching 	This is the default matching style. It searches for the given text anywhere in the chosen tag, ignoring case differences. For example a search for mode in the Artist tag would match Depeche Mode.
Case Sensitive 	This search is just like Normal Matching, except that the search must match the exact case of the text.
Pattern Matching 	This is the most powerful search method. The search text you type in will define a regular expression used to search within the tag. Regular expressions are beyond the scope of this documentation, but the application can help you form a regular expression. JuK uses the regular expression style.
Simply choose the conditions you want to include in your search, and click OK to create your search playlist!