Archive for June, 2005

Software Request: mp3-Tagger à la del.icio.us

As I have written previously I would love to have some way of tagging functionality in iTunes.

Right now my setting looks a bit like this:

  • I use the “Grouping” field for my tags. The tags I am currently using are things like “slow fox” or “rumba” as I am currently cataloging my collection of ballroom dance music. But I will be using tags like “electro” or “typical latino” or whatever to actually describe the styles of the songs - just to get much better and faster search functionality when I really need to find some music that is similar, e.g. when I am preparing music to play at a dancesport competition.
  • There are some cool apple scripts out that allow adding and deleting single tags from the fields “grouping” or “comments”. The scripts I use are really useful, but far from really what I want (see below). Nevertheless - they are pretty close in functionality and the only thing that is out there (yet.)

What I really would like:

  • A posting interface like the experimental posting popup from del.icio.us. The features I want are:
    • simple tag creation. just type the tag into some form field and it is created
    • re-use of old tags. show a list of tags that I have used before, and make them clickable!
    • make the selected tags stand out from the list so I can de-select them again!
  • Some additional features for the interface:
    • Give me the choice to group tags. e.g. “Dance” (would group Waltz, Cha-cha, Salsa). This way I can easily select tags that are sorted in categories.
    • Give me the choice to rename tags easily.
  • Some other stuff I would love to do with these tags:
    • playlist creation based on tags - easy, fast and useful - a “there is no step 3″-approach.
    • find similarities based on tags, make music recommendations, hey, make shuffle take into account music similarity and/or diversity! (How about a setting that goes like: shuffle my music, make 5 songs similar then completely switch to a different style and do another 5 songs!)

Latin Rap

I am just browsing the german iTMS highlight “latin rap”. There is quite a variety of music styles there - much of what I would not consider to be latin rap, it just sounds different than what I was lloking for. My hunger for this kind of music was created when I first got my hands on their first Album “A Lo Cubano” which I really loved. Their second album “Emigrante” was quite nice as well, but nowhere near the first.

But, back to the iTMS selection: definitely on my list if albums to check out are:

Ojos de Brujo

has been on my list of “music to check out” for quite some time, being recommended to me from multiple sources. iTMS lists them as “World Music”, but I would rather put them in some corner of latin music/flamenco/spanish music mixup.

Bari

Wordpress - Live Comment Preview

Anyone having problems with the Live Comments Plugin for WordPress: There seems to be some lines of code missing in comments.php so that logged in users do not get the live preview.

A workaround can be found at the WordPress Support forums.

iPod Mini problems

Apple 4 GB iPod Mini Silver M9800LL/A Last friday my ipod mini started having problems - turning itself off, for example. Today I realized after having the ipod sit on the AC adapter for 2 days it still has no full battery - actually it was dead after about 10 songs.

I checked google and found two good facts:

  1. The iPod is still under warranty and this includes dead batteries etc.
  2. A reset might work. I will see tomorrow.

[update Montag, 6. Juni 2005] The hardware reset seems to have worked - battery full and functional for 2 h straight.

[update Mittwoch, 8. Juni 2005] Still annyoing. This morning the ipod showed a 2/3 full battery, after one song it complained about no power. Hardware reset -> battery display was full again. 10 minutes of playback and the battery was empty, this time for good. That makes it a total of about 2 hours playback since the last recharge, no backlight enabled.

Next try: resetting the whole ipod plus firmware.

[update Donnerstag, 9. Juni 2005] This seems to have fixed all problems.

[update Friday, 10. Juni 2005] Nope, still buggy as hell. I just ordered the little box to send it back to apple.

[update Friday June 17th] my replacement iPod just arrived. All is fine again.