Tag Scanner Screen Capture
I’ve use a lot of applications to try and improve the state of my ridiculously over-sized music library. Some have been better than others, that’s for sure.
Over the last while I’ve been entirely falling back on a Russian developed application called TagScanner. It’s solid, dependable, doesn’t attempt to offer any crap-ware on install, receives a reasonable amount of updates (which work well!), and it allows you to happily tag every different sort of music file you can think of with pretty much any or all tag types. So whether you prefer mp3, OGG, or FLAC, TagScanner will do the job. You can search for matches in FreeDB, Discogs, Amazon or TrackType.org which means you’re definitely going to find a match for most albums in existence. Did I forget to mention the best bit? It’s free!
This also means that you’ve got access to a huge range of sources for album covers, letting you embed the album cover into each file as well as giving you the option to save a copy of the album cover locally.
Finally it also includes something I consider to be important – the renaming of actual file names in whatever format you choose. So, once I’ve gotten the correct tags for said album I just switch to the “Music Renamer” tab and using “%artist% – %album% – %track% – %title%”, I rename all the files. This keeps things, somewhat anally, neat in my filing system and also means that if I’m searching for music files through the OS rather than a music library, I can easily find what I’m looking for, it also means if something accidentally gets misplaced, I can track it down.
Spiel from TagScanner Website
TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player.
via The Ultimate TagScanner.
Merry Swing Dancers!
Last night, being a a Thursday night, means it’s swing dance night for me. This involves wrapping up work a little earlier than usual and heading to the Amrita Centre for Performing Arts where we have an hour and a half class courtesy of the excellent Phnom Penh Pswings.
After this we head to Equinox and get some food and do some less, un, structured dancing.
Last night was a little different though as we had live Gipsy Jazz, two French guys playing guitar and electric violin run through a small amp. They played some well know Django Reinhardt (sp!) and Stefan Grappelli, along with other great tunes.
Lots and lots of dancing ensued and much much fun was had.
Great night! Hopefully I’ll get some photos uploaded soon.
Update
I sorted out uploading a short video clip. Quality is fairly poor as I’m just using my old point and shoot digital, but it gives you an idea of what was going on. The band were great!
http://www.vimeo.com/9931670
Update 2
I’ve also uploaded some photos from the night! You can check them out over here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/alexleonard2003/PhnomPenhPSwingsAtEquinox
It’s all getting very exciting in the world of WordPress. Version 3 isn’t a million miles away and includes some fantastic changes!
- Menu Management built into core
WooThemes introduced a menu manager and the WP team liked it so much that they asked if WooThemes wanted to contribute it to the core. It looks solid, straightforward, and very nice altogether.
- Mµ Merge
WordPress is merging the WordPress Mµ codebase. There’ll now just be one version which will do all that you need. This is great news.
- BuddyPress for all (not specifically version 3 related)
BuddyPress is now available as a plugin and works on standard WP installations! Not only that, there’s a new “Template Pack” plugin that ensures you can keep your own theme but get all that BuddyPress goodness.
The future is looking bright for the WP platform!
Read more over on wordpress.org:
My word, when I signed up my musical alter-ego, Ebauche, to receive royalties from Last.fm, never did I think it would expand my wallet so massively.
Below is a screen shot showing my royalty earnings. I am loaded.
Ebauche's Royalty Earnings on Last.fm
Ladies and Gentlemen, the champagne is on me !
Ebay confuse me. Throughout my recent creation of a listing for an as-new RME Fireface UC I was told my ebay costs would come to 37 euro. When I received payment, said amount was deducted from me by PayPal. All appeared to be well.
This morning, about two weeks after that sale, I was surprised to find a ‘monthly invoice’ from Ebay for 67 euro in my inbox. Pardon me?
If this was some fee that’s standard on making a sale, Ebay managed very well, through their listing UI, to ensure I was not aware that I would be liable for this amount.
As far as I can tell that means my cost of selling the item on E.bay has been approx 15%. Which feel like a lot to me.
Was listening to this yesterday and figured I should share it out.
The track below, Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around by The Fairfield Four is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, in my humble opinion.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If you like this, then check them out over on Last.fm, or pick up an album on Amazon.
When I saw that Skype had business accounts available it made sense to me to sign up for one so that myself and my business partner could manage our Skype credit through a single business interface. Logical right?
Ever since that day I’ve found nothing but mass confusion on trying to manage our accounts through the system. We originally had two personal accounts, which we added to the business account. We had online numbers, but thanks to the confusion of the system if they were registered through the personal account then you can’t manage them through the business control panel. My Skype Pro subscription was through the business panel and therefore the SkypeIn number was not discounted. I had to transfer stuff all over the place, cancel things, etc etc. There was much discussion with Skype at the time, none of it made sense, I think eventually we were given credit for our trouble.
I will say that when I ranted a bit, Skype support were very helpful.
Now I’ve a new problem.
Just now I went to set up a new online number in an attempt to sort out managing my voicemail through Google Voice, for which I’ll require a US based number. I went to the business control panel, signed up for the new number and paid my $25 for the year.
I went to assign the number to my Skype account and I get told
Sorry, but you cannot allocate an online number to a personal account. You can only allocate online numbers purchased to business accounts created in your Business Control Panel.
Um, what!? But how did my first SkypeIn number get assigned to me?? None of this makes any sense. Skype have changed something somewhere and now I’m left with having to either:
- Create a new Skype account through the business control panel – I don’t even want to imagine the hassle this could cause seeing as I have an important Irish SkypeIn number which I absolutely can’t afford to lose.
- Sign into my “personal” account and just forget about the $25 I just threw in the bin and sign up for another SkypeIn number from there.
Option one makes my brain hurt with the how I would need to manage it. Option two means that I need to start adding credit to my personal account, get massively confused with SkypePro discount confusion, actually this option makes my brain hurt as well.
Why the hell do companies make buying things from them such an incredible pain in the ass.
Yesterday I decided to treat myself (given my recent sale of a soundcard on Ebay) to the Motorola Milestone, a recently launched phone running Google’s Android OS.
I’m posting this using the even more recently launched WordPress app for Android, which appears to be a highly polished app for managing multiple WordPress blogs. Nice work Automattic!
The Milestone feels good. Beautiful screen, responsive, easy shifting from one app to another. I just read my feeds over breakfast and it was definitely a pleasant change from the small screen on the E71. It’s one of the reasons I decided to get this phone – my move to Cambodia has resulted in me having a lot more time away from a laptop/desktop and I’ve been using my mobile for a lot more web browsing, communication and social interaction. Having a phone with a nice big screen might save me from going blind.
I had been tempted by the Nexus One, but the high price over here, coupled with the lack of a physical keyboard pushed me towards the Milestone.
So here I am, sitting on my balcony in my new flat, sipping coffee and posting to my blog. Nice. The photo at the top is the view from my balcony and taken with the 5mp camera on the milestone.
I recently wrote a review of the elegant WordPress plugin called “After the Deadline”, which is a fantastic tool designed to help you write better articles on your WordPress-based website.
The great news is that this fantastic functionality is now available for writing anywhere on the web through a simple Firefox Extension.
…we’re pleased to announce the release of the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox.
After the Deadline works in text areas on most webpages. Simply push a button F7 or click to check your spelling, style, and grammar no matter where you are.
This add-on has all the After the Deadline features. You can enable the style checker options you use in the preferences and you can ignore errors to prevent them from coming up.
via After the Deadline for Firefox – Released « After the Deadline.
Download After the Deadline for Firefox
Another death-knoll for IE6. Hopefully the lingering user base will continue to rapidly decrease for this ancient browser. The more high-profile sites that continue to drop support for this browser the better.
I will feel more and more confident in placing a warning at the top of sites that is shown to IE6 users only which recommends that they upgrade their browser (there really is no excuse for using IE6 anymore).
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.
via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Modern browsers for modern applications.
