Navarr's Tech Side

Five years ago, I didn’t care a single little bit about music in any way shape or form.  Now, I have over 4 gibibytes or so of it, and I can’t seem to find an application to manage it decently.

I recently tried MediaMonkey, but what i thought would auto-update all of my music, just assigned it to the album of a completely unrelated artist and screwed up a good bit of my library!  Ughh!

So, I’m still trying to find a Music Management Application that can do the following:

• Update MP3 ID3 Tags (with:)
• Update Album Artwork (High Resolution)
• Update Album and Track names and Artists, Year, Genre (basics)
• Add/Update Lyrics (Unsynchronized & Synchronized if Possible)
• Move into custom directories the user specifies.

It needs to do this for both English/Japanese tracks.  iTunes and Windows Media Player both do most of these functions fairly well, but their library isn’t nearly big enough.

If I had an app that could do all that perfectly, and almost automatically, that would be great.  Pulling the data from wherever it needed to, FreeDB, Gracenote, Amazon, anything it could possibly get its hands on.

Does anybody know of an app that does all/most of this, or am I eventually going to have to write my own?

I’ve pushed a simple update to the SimpleTwitter JavaScript.  Change log (if its even needed) below.

• Support for Twitter Lists
  • Uses the same format as twitter, for example @navarr/shogi
• Support for Turled Profiles
  • Using the variable &turl=true will link @replies to turled beta-profiles instead of twitter profiles.
  • Surprisingly, this doesn’t break in co-ordination with lists.  It just doesn’t display the list.
• Uses Search API
  • We moved to the search API for retrieving tweets, as well as pulling a JSON file instead of XML.  This MAY BREAK your current implementation (though it should not).  If it does, you can use the older script by pulling old.php from the server instead of index.php

Yeah, that’s it.  Was thinking about making the default for &turl being true instead of false, but figured that’d probably annoy more people than it was worth (at least until I get turled to be of more use as a twitter replacement).

If you read my personal blog (which a lot of you probably don’t even know exists) you’ll commonly see music embedded as mini-YouTube embeds.  It turns out, the magic height is 25 pixels, and the magic width (for play/pause and mute) is 62 pixels.

However, it is kind of a burden to do this every time you want to embed a mini player (you have to edit at four fields in the HTML!)  So to simplify this process, I, like any programmer before me, created a generator.  Just type in the URL to the YouTube video and press make, and you’ll get a preview as well as the cross-browser HTML-esque mess of a code to embed.

Of course, if you’re truly lazy, just drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmark bar in your web browser, and click it on any YouTube video and you’ll be taken to the page with the code already generated.

Generate Mini-Player

Source code is available via link at the bottom of the page.

A long time ago I wrote some PHP code for the AudioScrobbler API.  I wrote it as more of a proof-of-concept and never touched it again, so I don’t know how well it works.  I may play around with it some more as part of a test just to make sure the thing still works, but I wanted to share my code with you.

Source available at codepad and continued after the break.

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So, I got those screenshots I was telling you about yesterday.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  As for four, that depends on if each single picture is worth a thousand words or the algorithm for how much a multitude of pictures together are worth.

I observed today on the Facebook account of a person close to me, some changes that had been made to the site that really stood out and grabbed my attention.  Upon review, these changes are not currently in affect on my own version of the Facebook page, and have not yet been reported by any of the major Facebook blogs, so I will post some reports on what I saw here.

The header is a bit bigger, and the notification icon has been moved up to it, possibly the application icon as well but I did not take a close look.  I think there was also a message icon to display the unread count of the inbox.

Assuming this wasn’t an error, (or that it was and it isn’t fixed by tomorrow) I should be able to present you with screenshots.

Otherwise, please be on the lookout for these changes, and if you notice them yourself, please upload a screenshot to some site and link to it from here.

I hope to bring you continued coverage of these changes as they unfold.

So, I’ve started a boycott.  This one’s for real, although I’m unable to participate in it myself (I can’t afford a new phone.)

Please join me in my efforts to Boycott Virgin Mobile USA.  The company blocks twitter.  That’s really the only reason.  They acknowledge that they “do not support it” and they refuse to support it, despite my unlimited plan, so, I’m calling for a boycott!

Please Tweet this blog and join me in my efforts!  This is unacceptable =)

Thanks~

Navarr

Practically overnight, too.  Of course, that thanks to my knowledge of Java and PHP, as well as tutorials by About.com.  Basically, C++ is like this:

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