A better part of last week was spent teasing apart the disgusting knots that I had been letting pass as tagging among my files. The very same knots that made Jinzora damn near unusable and made Amarok look like a dollar store threw up all over MySQL. It took about 24 man hours but I tackled the genre issue along with the problem of null artists and albums, however there still appears to be some lingering issues as Amarok is reporting dead or unplayable tracks. Permissions maybe?
I’m coming to the conclusion that huge collections can be a real nightmare if tagging and preventive maintenance is not addressed up front. Having left mine to evolve over some seven years I am now really paying the price as I try and get it into a functional whole. Thankfully, there are some solid tools out there as I am leveraging Amarok with a MySQL backend for reporting (N to the E dropping in on the R and D), EasyTag, and Picard (Amarok has it baked in but it is nice to have discrete tools).
To get started I imported everything into amarok and then wrote a group of reports looking for malformed tags, particularly ones using reserved characters like “;” which would cause Jinzora to choke. Combing through the report for the obvious issues like null genre I used the sort and mass edit feature of Amarok to fill them in which made for smooth sailing. Tracks that were an absolute disaster I fixed either with EasyTag or Picard, though I found the later to offer up some less than desirable data due to taggers as lazy as I posting to Music Brainz.
At the moment I feel like I am about 80% finished, more than enough to listen to my collection the way that I like but with still enough bugs to get me hot under the collar. The bonus with a cleaner collection is now we can play music off the server for our greyhound which means I can track his listening over at Last.fm. Yes, I am that much of a dork. 
Published by james on October 13, 2006
in Site.
Spending a better part of my morning frantically backing up Candied Pop, which is hosted by 1&1, as the site appeared to be in a downward spiral. After a call to their tech support I found out that the database hosting was the issue and that “it is being looked into.” As of now the site is slowly coming back to life, albeit sluggishly, and hopefully by noon it will be 100%. It is times like these that I wish I had the cash to burn for some high speed line to the home so I could self-host it all.
Over the last couple of months I noticed some directed searches on my name coming from Yahoo! Japan. Now, I only know two people in Japan whom I haven’t seen in over a year (or talked to, hello?). Short of the Yakuza picking up my scent I’m pretty sure I know who they are so, hey, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email as it has been a long while.
Geologist and his rock deemed a threat. Rock confiscated for the safety of all. Robert M. Thorson, a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut, hassled for his favorite rock writes,
I suppose I could have put the grapefruit-sized specimen inside my sock, swung it around my head like a mace, charged the cabin and attempted to hijack the flight…Perhaps your tax dollars will be used by an internal think tank of agency hire-ups to ponder why on earth a geologist would travel with a rock. Who knows?(No Stone Unturned)
Scary rocks!
Photographic proof of the Gneissian ThreatI for one feel safer knowing that the bureaucracy works tirelessly to protect me from dual-use items such as chunks of gneiss. Thanks, TSA, that was a close one!
via Boing Boing
Tangled in the sheets I threw myself out of the bed at the sound of a thud, like a body sailing against the front door rattling the frame and making the lamp on my nightstand shiver. My vision wavered as I swung my head to check the clock which in a spreading halo of red shone 3:05. Running to the hallway I saw our dog standing in the living room looking around while the two cats crouched low against the sofa. Streetlight flooded the room in a sickly yellow glow as inky shadows shifted about my feet. Turning slowly to the back windows I caught a reflection of someone staking outside. My breath caught in my throat as I hunched over and darted to nearest wall, pressing up against it I wished I had something to hold as a weapon.
My thoughts drifted to my grandmother who kept a stout length of hickory, turned like an old fashioned policeman’s club with a leather cord looped through the handle, by her bedside. “Interlopers will regret crossing my threshold,” she would rasp and I imagined her one hand firmly on her walker, the other raising the club with deadly intent, and her face contouring in rage as her white nightdress flowed behind as she shuffled determinedly towards the intruder. I had nothing beyond a rolled up magazine within reach though it would be unlikely that a swift smack from Vegetarian Times would be enough to dissuade a would be thief. Visions of a lanky man, topped by a stringy mullet, and wearing a sleeveless tee shirt adorned with a skull wrapped in the Confederate flag and the words “Southern Pride” printed in simple block letters filled my mind. The room shrank as I saw him, stained and broken teeth, menacing my wife with a dull, small caliber revolver breathing out a cheap whiskey soaked, “I wants what’s mine..”
With as much courage as I could muster I peeled myself from the wall and sprinted into the kitchen hoping to make it to the back door before the skulker reached it. Panic set in as I saw someone at the door and it looked as if the doorknob was turning with moonlight and streetlight glinting over its shiny brass surface. Slipping on the runner near the sink I leapt for the door and for the first time looked my adversary deep in the eyes. Running into the counter I stared hard as the microwave cheerfully lit the up the corner of the kitchen with the time. 3:06. Why was he wearing dark maroon pajama pants with dogs printed allover?
There is such a thing as too much Court TV before bedtime.
For all intents and purposes my cheap-ass home stereo solution has been working out real well but there is one minor problem and it is a problem that many of my friends have laughed at me for or just shook their heads in disgust muttering, “Have you no shame? None!?” My tags are a total mess. Worse than having non-existent, bizarre combinations like “CountryFusionSpaceJazzBop”. No, I have bleed-over where song titles end up in track numbering and genres become a string of unsupported characters. It is sickening to look at especially since it renders Jinzora damn close to useless for the way I listen to music (smartlists on random).
Here are some highlights from the genre tag:
- ■Hip-Hop
- “Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp min
- 0.03
- 03_Chaconne con variazioni.mp3
- 4
- false
- Nameless (Radio App..”
- true
To give you an indication of how big the problem is there are 6446 tracks tagged with either “-” or are empty in the genre field and on top of that I have some 33049 tracks to check. An egregious case of WTF if there every was one. So now I need to figure out how to remedy this problem and wishing that I were more diligent about my tagging like some of my friends isn’t going to get me very far.
What I need is stupid simple, easy, and relatively accurate system as I have neither the time nor the patience to hand tag every single track. So to get my feet wet, I’m going to narrow the directories down to smaller groups and give the auto-tagging feature of EasyTag a shot and see how that works. In the past EasyTag has served me well but I’ve only used it in small isolated instances and am not sure how it will handle chewing on hundreds if not thousands or tracks at a time. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work.
