Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I have a rather large MP3 collection.  The directories and files are named correctly more or less, but ID3 tags used to be a mess until very recently.  Two applications helped me to bring some order in that mess.

EasyTag, a GUI application, that helped me to fix lots of broken and add lots of missing comments to my MP3 files.  The smart thing about this program is that it can figure out a lot of data from the names of the files and directories, and that it can grab and replicate partial data from within the albums.

The second program that I wanted to mention, I just found out about today (thanks to Michael Stepanov’s delicious bookmarks).  It’s called tag2utf.  It’s a little Python script that converts the encoding of ID3 tags from koi8 or cp1251 (two most widely used Russian encodings) to utf8.  It’s very easy to install (the only requirement my system needed was python-eye3d library, which exists in Fedora repository) and use.  Just run it from the command line with no parameters and it will recursively look in the current directory for any files that have ID3 tags in non-utf8 encoding.  It will then give you a choice of two encodings to select from (koi8 or cp1251), a “skip” option, and a “manual” option.  All you will have to do is take a quick look at the files, and chose to either convert them from one of the two options, skip them or convert manually one by one.  You will have to make this choice for every directory with non-utf8 files.  Optionally, you can specify on the command line which directories to scan.  In case you need to convert from some other non-Russian encoding to utf8, the script is trivial to modify.

Both tools are excellent pieces of software.  It took me practically no time at all to fix my mp3 collection.  Now I can search it better, and all files display nicely in any mp3 player.  Brilliant stuff!

Listening to Raven’n'Blues show from BFBS I learned about Pandora.

Pandora is a result of Music Genome Project. Basically, what they do is analyze a lot of music for rythms, instruments, vocals, and a whole lot of other criterias and then help you find the music that you like.

Excellent science project with perfect end user appliance. You get a single box to fill in - write the band or album that you like and you’ll get a whole bunch of music that matches your taste. I’ve been playing around it for half a day only and I have to say that it works out great. Maybe my taste is too simple though. But anyway, I’ve heard many songs that I’ve heard before as well as a lot of new stuff.

You don’t even have to register to try it out for an hour or so. If you’ll listen for longer, it will ask you to create an account, which is as simple as giving your email address, adding a password, and specifying your birth year (you can lie, ma). They also aks for a ZIP code, which is USA specific, but you can always use the Beverly Hills’ 90210.

Enjoy! Let it be my Christmas present to all of you.

Update: You can also save your favourites to a list, share your stations, and do a lot of other cool stuff. My favourites page is here.

Since many people had asked me this before and some did just recently - I do believe in copyright law. I believe that the person who created a piece of something, be that music, movie, software, or anything else, has the right to dictate how this piece can be used, distributed, and copied.

I try to obide by the copyright law, but I am not always successful. There is no hypocrisy in this. In the same way, I believe in the traffic laws but don’t always follow them. I try to though.

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Usually, when I work I need absolute silence. Especially when I write code. Any sound disturbs me. Those which have to do with human voices (phone calls, talks, music) are the most harmful. I never turn the music on or anything else when I program. I also prefer to leave all my development tasks for my night shifts.

But toda I found out that I can actually listen to music while writing code. I was looking for some new radio stations at Shoutcast to add to my music player and stumbled across some Jazz stations. I decided to try one before adding it to the list. I wasn’t yet programming, so it was OK to liste to it for some time.

It was only in the morning, 8 hours later that I noticed that I’ve programmed and did everything I had to do and never switched off the Jazz music. It didn’t disturb me even one bit. In fact I have a suspecion that it actually helped me. I will be repeating the experiment, but until than I’m surprised anyway…