Category Archives: mp3s

Hump Day (My Lovely, um, Weekly Hump?)

The Midwest FurFest confirmation postcards arrived yesterday from Vistaprint. In the past, I printed up all the postcards myself, front and back, then cut them up, the put labels and stamps on them, then mailed them. That was fine when it was just a couple hundred. Last year, I mailed out close to 800 postcards. It was very clear that it was time to choose a different route. takaza did a fantastic job sourcing a vendor for who would pre-print the postcards, then he worked with film2edit to come up with a beautiful design for the postcard front. When I got a look at the finished product yesterday, I was thrilled! It’s a quality print job, and the cost was a quarter of the quotes that we got locally, and they sent the cards to us four days earlier than we expected them. I’d really recommend Vistaprint!

So, my task tonight is to stop by the post office and buy a whole bunch of (new, improved, more expensive) postcard stamps to stock up for the year, finish stamping the hundred-odd cards I have in hand, and drop those into the mail (I’ve got one in the for you, Chilly, so you can see the finished product!). I need to stop a couple of other places as well, but that’s fine – the weather should be nice, and it’ll be good to cruise a bit with the windows down and some good music playing. Once I get home, it’ll eithe rbe pork chops of pierogis for dinner, depending on how motivated we are (and what the sell-by date on the pork chops is!).

Speaking of music, thanks to everyone for their music recommendations yesterday! I hope to sit down tonight and sample a little of each artist. I promise I’ll let you know what I think (and if anyone else has suggestions, feel free to add them). Now that I have our MP3 library in order, I’m steadily adding to it. We’ve also found a neat new way to use it: Orb. This is a nifty utility that lets you stream your MP3 library to the web painlessly – no IP spoofing, no client software needed. You load up their Flash-based site and it handles everything for you. The biggest downside for us: one connection per username, so if Dan’s listening and I log in, I knock him offline. The site offers some sharing functionality that I need to investigate further, though.

Aaaaand back to work!

My MP3 Cup Overfloweth

How unique – a LiveJournal entry that isn’t a meticulous chronicle of my daily life 🙂

We’re in the middle of attempting to combine and sort through our MP3 library on a single server in takaza‘s office. Happily, it’s hooked into the network so it’s accessible from anywhere in the house. As we’ve combined stuff down, a nasty by-product is the discovery of duplicate files – mostly stuff that was on different computers. In some, but not all, the more recent files have been fed through MusicBrainz and properly tagged. Were that the case universally, it would be much earier to sort through the 2,500+ duplicates (out of around 17,000 tracks). It’s looking like I’m going to have to sort through manually and remove either mis-tagged or, in some cases, lower bitrate files (how the heck did that happen?). Fortunately, MediaMonkey is excellent for identifying duplicates, and the interface seems to be good for comparing the files and deciding what to keep. I expect that once we ahev everything in place I’ll set up a local library and a network library in iTunes so I can keep stuff locally on my laptop to sync with my iPod, and also have tunes on hand when I’m mobile.

It’ll be interesting to see if we have the network throughput to play MP3’s from the remote server and pipe it to the Airport Express once everything is up and running. Speaking of which, some of you may recall we were getting a nasty ground loop hum from the conection beteen the Airport Express and our stereo. After doing some research it turns out this is not a unique problem, but the solution was simple: go digital! I got an inexpensive TOSlink cable from Amazon ($4.95 with free two-day shipping!) and now everything seems to be running flawlessly there.

Dan is looking at possibly building a new desktop for use as a server, since the one we have now is a P3 500 MHz oldster he picked up from work. After skimming through the listings on Newegg I can officially say my technical know-how of desktops and motherboards and such is so far out of date it’s not funny – circa 2000 or so. This is what happens when you switch to 100% laptops, I guess. Anyway, it looks like he can build something reasonably cheaply, and it should be an interesting project.

Wait for my iPod?

As you may have heard, yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Seeing that on a typical workday morning, I see takaza for all of five minutes before I head off to work (I go in to get dressed at 6 AM, when he wakes up), and given that there are a number of wonderful descriptions for Dan but none of them include the phrase “morning person”, we elected to exchange V-Day gifts when he got home in the evening. That evening, we both had tooth-rottingly cute cards for each other, and there was a folded-up piece of paper in mine. I opened it up and it was a list of upcoming showings for Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me, a fabulously funny NPR program recorded right here in Chicago, for me to choose from. Dan then opened up the envelope I gave him with his card to find…tickets to this week’s taping of Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me. We both burst out laughing. Evidently, we know each other well enough and share the same tastes enough that we got each other the same gift. It works out since Dan hadn’t actually bought the tickets yet, and he made my birthday so lovely that it all evens out. He then cooked up some tasty macaroni and cheese (with lots of thick-sliced bacon! arr num num num) and we had a nice relaxing evening.

Well, sort of relaxing. My iPod has become the bane of my existence. Well, not really; more accurately our MP3 collection has become the bane of my existence. We have about 35 Gb of MP3’s (about 8,300 tracks) that we have accumulated over the last six or seven years. Because they’re from a wide variety of sources the ID3 tags (information in each file that contains artist, album, and song title, plus other info) are of varying quality, from quite thorough to completely blank. With my last MP3 player, this wasn’t an issue because it relied more on the file name so I could usually figure out what I was listening to. The iPod, though, ignores file names and relies completely on ID3 tag information. If I want to, say, play all tracks in a given genre, or by a given artist, I’m out of luck if that information isn’t on a track.

I found an excellent program to fill in the ID3 information on a semi-automated basis. In my first pass I fed it all 8,300 tracks and wound up with about6,100 tracks identified and tagged and 2,200 tracks that had to be identified manually. Well, that wasn’t going to work, plus if I want podcasts and room for new music I was going to have to leave room on my iPod for those, and it only holds 30 Gb. So I sorted through the files and split them into those that I wanted to carry around, and those I could comfortably leave behind, with about 20 Gb of tracks going onto the iPod. I fed those files into MusicBrainz and this was better – after some whittling down, I’m down to about 630 tracks still to be identified manually. I think i can pare that down further, but I expect that in the end I’ll still have to sort through 400 files or so. I’m actually glad of it, though – I’m finding that we have a lot more electronica than I thought we did, and that’s my music of choice when working out at the gym.

Once I get all the files straightened out and uploaded to the iPod, I’ve found a nifty utility that will add album art to the files, which will show up on the iPod display when the track is playing. Then I need to start picking up podcasts; I’ve already got Wait Wait.. and NPR’s Story of the Day subscriptions set up, and I need to go hunting around to see what else tickles my fancy. altivo, I’ll admit I’m a slacker and I still haven’t checked out your podcasts, and woodychitwn had a good recommendation a while ago, though I’m not sure how I’d feel about listening to that while working out 🙂 I’ll have to see what I can find. Oh, and on top of all of this, I just found Azureus, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with it. I’ve found that when you have a flaky wireless connection, though, Bittorrent doesn’t work very well. I need to work on that.