There are a few nice and shiny services out there that offer automatic MP3 re-tagging, but I have never found one that does everything I want. The fully automated solutions really scare me, and others require that you use iTunes. I'm sure they work fine for the majority of people (in fact a lot of them work on both PC and Mac), but I wanted something a little more powerful. For a long time it's been a dream of mine to find a program that can query the Last.fm database and re-tag my music (specifically genres) using their accurately crowd-sourced information. I even went so far as to hobble together my own PHP script that did this, but it was clunky and I am not very proud of it (so I won't be posting it here). This dream came true when I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

Right out of the box, Picard will scan your music library and find the proper band names, album titles, release dates, and song titles for your music. It will also find all kinds of extra information such as the publisher, country of origin, catalog number, and barcode for specific albums. If you agree with the information it suggests, you can click "Save" and rest easy knowing you're on your way to MP3 tag bliss.

So what's this about Last.fm tags? Picard Tagger supports plugins, and more specifically, there is a plugin called LastFMPlus. LastFMPlus extends Picard's tagging capabilities to include very specific genres, grouping (more broad genres), moods (happy, sad, trippy), occasions (summer, driving), and more. What's even better is Picard will perform searches on a per-track basis, so you don't have to worry about artists or albums that cover more than one genre. There is a pretty detailed tutorial on how to install and use it on their website, but it's been down for me more than once, so I've hosted the tutorial myself which you can download right here. I've also hosted the plugin myself, which can be downloaded here. Their tutorial doesn't cover everything and assumes you already know how to use Picard, so I'll quickly go over the main points so you don't have to read any more than you already are.

Installation & Setup

After you've downloaded Picard, install it but don't open it yet. Download the LastFMPlus plugin and extract it to the plugins folder within your Picard installation directory. Once you've extracted it, there should be a lastfmplus folder in the plugins folder. Within that, there should be two python (.py) files. If you're hardcore, you could open these in a text editor and modify the plugin yourself, but you probably won't need to.

Run Picard and do what any self respecting geek would do first: open the options. You can click through and enable and disable whatever you like, but in order to enable the plugin, you'll have to click Plugins and enable Last.fm Plus. You can also enable other useful plugins that came bundled with Picard, like Disc Numbers, which will properly tag multi-disc albums. When you're done, click OK to close the options panel, and then open it back up again. Next to Plugins on the left side, there should be [+] icon indicating there's more underneath that menu item. Go ahead and click that to reveal the Last.fm Plus plugin options. You can play with these settings or leave them all at default, but what you have to do is go over to the 2nd tab and click the bold "Load Defaults" button at the bottom. Now click OK.

Let the tagging begin

Now you're ready to really get started. Picard has two main windows: the left side which shows you unmatched files, and the right side which shows you songs that are ready to tag. Use the toolbar buttons at the top to add individual files or an entire folder to the left window. Once they are listed, click "Cluster" to group them by album. If you're tagging individual songs, there's no need to cluster. If you already have fairly well tagged music, you can select which songs from the left window that you want to look up and click "Lookup". The selected songs will be moved to the right side and let you know it's "loading album information". A few seconds later, you should be able to see which, if any, of your selected songs were found. There will be a rectangular meter next to the matched songs indicating how well your song was matched to the one in the database. If it was a perfect match, you'll see a fully green meter. You can right click on the song in the right window and inspect its details to see the custom tags that were added by LastFMPlus. If you're happy with the results, select the song(s) you want to save and click "Save".

If your tags are a mess or the "Lookup" button is finding incorrect matches, there's still hope. Picard uses fingerprinting to determine the origin of your music even if you have completely incorrect tags or no tags at all. Add your music to the left window as you normally would, except click "Scan" instead of "Lookup". It takes a little longer than usual, but it will more than often find a match. There were a few cases when, despite proper pre-existing tags, "Lookup" failed to properly find a match, but "Scan" did. 

That wasn't so bad

With my 1000+ album music library, Picard was unable to find proper tag information for about a dozen of them. One of the downsides is that if the album isn't in Picard's database, then you can't use the LastFMPlus plugin to at least get proper genre information. Even with this limitation, a 1.2% failure rate is something that I'm willing to live with. Not to mention it even found some rarer bootlegs that I wasn't expecting it to find. I also had some bizarre matches with a few albums, specifically in cases when it finds matches across multiple releases of the same album (like deluxe editions), so I had to manually move around the matched tracks so that they made up a single complete matched album. You also might have problems finding albums if you're searching for them on (or before) their release date. This is because Picard uses a user-contributed database, so if nobody else has added that album before you, it's not going to pull any matches. This is a good opportunity for you to contribute!

So it's not perfect, but it's damn good. It has satisfied my need for perfect tags the most out of any solution I've tried, and it allows a wide range of customization. Now we can all create incredibly specific playlists depending on any mood or occasion. 

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The secret to great website banners.

What started out as an experiment turned into a pretty cool way to find some totally sweet banners for my site. I came up with the idea after thinking It would be cool to have some pictures of dinosaurs and robots and space ships to use as a banner background. Having absolutely zero photos of any of those things, I turned to the next best source: Flickr. I started out doing random searches for single tags, but I wasn't finding anything worthy at all. It was mostly just portraits of people in front of dinosaur statues or people's home-made robotic experiments. Boring.

Having no way filter out tags from a search, my next thought was to search for pairs of tags. One tag would be the primary subject of my search (like a dinosaur), and the second tag would be something like a verb or photographic technique that might filter out portraits and other boring photos (like macro). The results were immediately improved. I set about creating two lists of words that when randomly paired up might produce interesting photos. The banner up above was the end product. So far I'm incredibly pleased with some of the results:

I'll admit that a lot of the photos which look good as a banner wouldn't even be considered great photography as photos on their own, but that doesn't even matter. The secret to transforming them into a great banner is simple: Offset by -50 pixels on both the X and Y axis and crop to 650 by 300 pixels. Instant background art.

It's not always this awesome, though. Even with this great formula for success at your fingertips, you'll still encounter some duds. To help remove terrible and/or inappropriate photos, I've implemented a system that will check to see if a photo has been viewed in the past, and if so, check it's voting score. Once a photo has reached a score of -3 (it has been given a thumbs-down three times), it will no longer appear on the site. Here's a few duds I'll be glad to never see again:

And finally...

So there you have it. That's all I have to say about that.

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Well, it's the same blog. It just looks new.

First thing: I decided to play with HTML 5 because it's the new hip thing to do. I later found out that there's no real benefit for me to use HTML 5 tags over regular ones right now. As a result, my website is severely crippled in Internet Explorer. I'll fix that in the next day or two.

Update: I somewhat fixed things for ol' IE. The random photo banner doesn't really work past the first page-load, and there are no fancy CSS 3 rounded corners. 

Second thing: The banner at the top uses photos sourced from Flickr searches using a combination of two words that are chosen at random from a pool of about two dozen. I tried to use more abstract words that might filter out photos of people. At the bottom of the page, you can see what words were chosen for the currently displayed banner photo. I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday (about 7,500 Flickr API requests in 24 hours) tweaking the list of words so that I get more interesting results. It's not perfect; I still get a lot of really bad photos. Some really good ones, but some really awful. So right now I am risking you coming to my site and seeing a completely inappropriate or confusing photo in my banner! To deal with this in the future, I've set up a little voting system where anyone can "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" a banner photo if it's particularly good or particularly bad. I'll also take suggestions for new words to add to the pool if you've got a good one!

Update: There's now a handy tooltip at the top that links directly to the Flickr photo used in the banner. Hovering over it will tell you what tags were used. I also added the words "bokeh", "catadioptric", "vignette", and "lomography". Thanks Keith and Brent!

Other things: Everything is way more simple. I completely got rid of comments! I may bring them back, but I don't really see a purpose for my site. If somebody really has something to tell me, they can send me an email. There's no search right now, mostly because I was really excited to get my new design up and running and some features didn't make make it in yet. There are some other minor CSS things that I need to fix too.

I was just really excited to get it online, guys! 

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I know it's bad to start blogging about your own blog, but I'm going to break that rule right now.

It's been just over one year since I started this site. I've actually had the domain since about 2004, but it's never been a true blog until last year.

Anyway, I tried not to force myself to think of topics to write about, and I think for the most part I was successful. I wrote my first entry on August 14, 2008 and I was planning on re-designing my website for its anniversary, but I'm a really good procrastinator, so that didn't pan out. I have a possible design I would like to roll out by the end of this month, but I've been pretty busy at home the past few weeks so it might have to wait until mid September.

So over the span of a year I wrote a total of 60 entries (if I counted correctly). In my first post I made a joke that I would probably look back at some with regret, but honestly I don't. At least I can't remember writing anything I regret. I thought about giving it up a few times, mostly when I couldn't think of anything to write, but I'm glad I kept it going.

Overall the experience has been pretty interesting. I've never been much of a public person, so writing about myself felt a little strange at times, but I kept personal details to a minimum and just rolled with it. I don't know if my writing skill has improved at all, either. It's hard to tell over such a long period. I have a lot of ideas for how my new blog is going to work, so I'm actually pretty excited to get it launched. This means it's going to be online sooner than later. I might make it a tradition of re-designing it once a year, but we'll see.

So here's to another year of posts mostly about organizing my music collection and/or complaining about my Zune!

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Hey remember that site I made?

It's been just over a month since I launched PrettyPreez.com, my little campaign to get funds for a free camera via strangers on the internet. It started out with moderate success, though all of the donations were from friends and co-workers. I kept up my part of the offer, but things kind of got put on the backburner when I took a 10 day holiday. I feel bad about this, but I fully intend to complete the final set of drawings and kick back into spamming people on Twitter. My goal (besides getting enough for a camera) is to at least get one single donation from a stranger.

Space space space space space.

It's no surprise to anyone that knows me that I've dabbled in the evil realm of MMORPGs from time to time (though "dabbled" might be a bit of an understatement, depending on who you ask). A few weeks ago I read an article about a game called EVE Online, and a player who was part of an in-game "corporation"  that acted as a bank for other players. This bank corporation would loan in-game money to other players and corporations, collect interest, and essentially act much like a bank acts in real life.

The interesting part I discovered was that there is no in-game mechanic that allows people to form banks, which means that it was completely player created and managed based on the honor system. And as it turned out, there are corrupt people in virtual banks just as there are in real ones. One of the members of this bank ended up stealing 200,000,000,000 ISK (that's interstellar kredits, and two hundred billion of them is a lot) from the bank, effectively causing everyone to withdraw their money and almost cause a collapse of the in-game market.

Okay so I realize that this post is getting really geeky really fast, but guys, you should read the article because it's actually pretty interesting. So interesting in fact that I decided to play the free 21-day trial and I was incredibly impressed. I've been complaining to Billie for a while about how every MMO is essentially the same and I want to play something different, so when I heard about this I had wondered why I hadn't tried it sooner. You can pretty much do anything you want and there are no rules, plus it's in space.

Oh yeah also:

Billie and I got new neighbors (a young couple) and although they're relatively quiet in the evenings, we still find reasons to complain about them to each other. For example the guy always parks his car in the visitor parking stall because it's conveniently close to their back gate. So I am officially taking suggestions for passive aggressive notes that I can place on his windshield.

I've also heard him blasting the end portion of Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine (you know the part, if not, watch this at 4:35) a total of three separate times in the parking lot. It's really classy. Also we're pretty sure wife beaters and track pants are the only clothing he owns. Despite this I once overheard him say "Gucci is alright, but Armani is better" and I am pretty sure he was completely serious.

We don't normally judge people like this, I swear, but it's just so easy in this case. It's hard not to.

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