2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10993749

Hungarian priest gets on skateboard to connect

Zoltan Lendvai’s first skateboard bore the papal coat of arms

A Hungarian Catholic priest who spreads God’s word from a skateboard has become an internet sensation.

A video of the Reverend Zoltan Lendvai, 45, in action has attracted almost 170,000 hits on YouTube.

The video, Funny Priest Skateboarding, shows Father Lendvai, clad in full clerical garb, displaying his moves.

It is not clear whether he has mastered the nose-grind or the kick-flip, but his skills have helped attract young people to his church.

Father Lendvai, whose first board bore the papal coat of arms, believes skateboarding can pave the way to God for young people.

He says his distinctive method of spreading the word on wheels is inspired by Saint John Bosco. The 19th century Italian priest and teacher dedicated his life to improving the lot of poor young people, using games as part of their education.

“Many times I have felt that this is the way I can bring many people a bit closer to Jesus,” Father Lendvai, who learned to skateboard at the age of 14 at school, told Reuters news agency.

However, it was not until he started to serve as a priest that he realised the switch stance and the shove-it might be more effective than the sermon in turning young people towards the church.

Three teenage boys who had never attended church before started coming regularly after he showed off his skateboard tricks, said Father Lendvai, who lives and preaches in Redics, a small village on Hungary’s border with Slovenia.

However, his four-wheeled ministry does not come cheap: he has given away at least six skateboards to his young parishioners.

A user would rate music, and indy.tv would try to play stuff he/she liked. This was similar to last.fm and a multitude of other more recent services.

Well, I found out some awesome music through that service, and I haven’t seen these bands resurface, so I decided to start uploading videos to youtube with these songs that used to be available on Indy.tv.

My taste is not, by far, universal. But for me these are memorable songs, so I’m going to hope someone out there discovers them through this effort.

Enjoy!

People Skills – Good

Read full article for the other songs. (click below)

_______________________________

Jen Kearney – I don’t feel

__________________________________

Ryan Du Bois – Sweird

]]> http://y.estamine.net/main/?feed=rss2&p=201&lang=en 1 http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=194&lang=en http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=194&#comments&lang=en Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:34:23 +0000 fullmooninu http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=194&lang=en (article after the comic is still only available in portuguese)

May 31, 2010

Abstract

Overtime, MSN Messenger contact lists get cluttered.

Usually because of spammers, friends that change or lose their e-mail, or contacts you no longer talk to.

Yes, you can organize them into groups, and you can block them. But the MSN protocol and all the evolutions it has suffered have left some serious room for messiness.

This tutorial tries to explain the basics for cleaning your MSN contacts.

Preparation:

You should login to your Live Messenger account and change your password (for safety reasons, but you can skip this step)

Login to http://home.live.com and click options. Then account options or change password. Change your password into something temporary for this tutorial.

The Steps:

1 List Rebuilder Tool:

Go to http://www.msngeeks.com/msn and use their List Rebuilder Tool

screenshot of list rebuilder tool

From the site: «This tool will delete all unnecessary contacts in your allow and block lists. Unnecessary being contacts you’ve deleted from your forward list, and who have also deleted you from their forward list.»

2 Miranda IM Contact Tool:

2.1 Download and install Miranda Instant Messenger:

Miranda is a MultiProtocol IM that comes with a useful tool.

Download it at:

http://www.miranda-im.org/download/

2.2 Configure Miranda for your Hotmail account:

Go like this:

Main Menu -> accounts -> add -> enter your MSN ID and password

2.3 Go Online:

This means you should enter your MSN through Miranda. When you see your contact list come up, similar to normal MSN Messenger, you know it is working.

2.4 Use Miranda IM management list tools:

Go like this:

Main menu -> options -> network -> (your ID) -> server list

screenshot of miranda tool

2.5 Change the information in your MSN contact list:

This is the information in your main Messanger Server list. It is a list of all the contacts connected to you and of their current state towards you. The stars represent the contact states. Give or take stars to change state.

Here’s how it works:

• Server list contacts: appears on your contact list as you login;
• Allowed (Active) contacts: can see your online status (can see if you’re online or not);
• Blocked contacts: cannot talk to you. Someone can’t be Blocked and Allowed at the same time.
• Somebody included you in his/her server list (yellow stars): people that have you on their server list. You have no control over this.

The possible states are then:

• Server, Allowed: can see you online, appears on your list, can talk (this is the default);
• Server: cannot see you online, appears on your contact list, can talk;
• Allowed: can see you online, does not appear on your contact list, can talk;
• Blocked: cannot see you online, does not appear on your contact list, cannot talk to you;
• Server, Blocked: cannot see when you are online, appears on your contact list. Possible to talk to, but ONLY if you start the conversation. This is kind of a hack.

Notes:

• There is no true way to remove contacts from your main Messenger Server list, if they include you on their server list (i.e. if they have a yellow star);
• The only straightway to keep someone from sending you an invite every time you login, is to block contacts. Or, if you just want your contact list uncluttered, and still want to be able to get messages from a user, keep them only in your active list.
• If you remove someone from your server list and you are not on their server list (i.e. if they dont have a yellow star), they will be removed from your main Messenger Server list altogether. This means they will not appear in the Miranda tool anymore. Thus, putting someone only in your active list is like an invitation for them to remove you. So be careful.

Remember your Netiquette!

• Final note: After finishing Step 2, you can repeat Step 1 – Rebuilder Tool – just in case. You could also use this occasion to clean your email contact list on live.com accordingly. Although Hotmail and Messenger lists are pretty much independent.

Practical Example:

This all is confusing at first. So let’s try to clarify it with an example.

Joe and Mary:

• Joe meets Mary. Mary gives Joe her Messenger ID.
• Joe adds Mary as a messenger contact. Mary is added to Joe’s main Messenger Server list. Mary is therefore added to Joe’s server list and allowed list. Joe is also added to Mary’s main Messenger Server list.
• The next time Mary logs in, Joe is already in her main Messenger Server list. She is then asked if she wants to add Joe to her server and allowed lists. The only other choice is to block him. If she doesn’t pick one of these, she will be asked the same question on every login.
• After a while, JOESTRIPJACKET tries some “sweet” moves on Mary. MARY2HOT4MYOWNGUD blocks him as a result.
• Joe is added to Mary’s blocked list, and thus removed from Mary’s server and active list.
• Joe gets a girlfriend and stops using “sweet” moves on Mary.
• Mary removes Joe from her blocked list. Joe is then no longer blocked.
• But, Mary doesn’t have much to talk to him, so she just adds him to her allowed list. Not to her server list. This is something she can do because she has read this tutorial.
• In such way, Joe does not appear on Mary’s contact list (which is the server list). But he can still talk to her if he wants.
• If Mary didn’t add Joe to her allowed list after unblocking him, she would be asked to add him to both her server list and allowed list every time she logged in. This way she keeps her contact list uncluttered and avoids annoying messenger prompts.
• The other alternative would be to add Joe to her server and blocked lists. This way she could talk to Joe normally, but only when she started the conversation.

2010

tutorial by estamine.net

here’s an initial image version, for easy spread:

1 – Information easily hides subliminal messages. Find the hidden message;

Information comes in all forms and usually in very small packages.  It’s very easy to get lost and to loose things.

2 – The internet is something with a global character. A more and more evident character;

Here you see, in the site download.com , a small non-western religious application is the 38th most downloaded piece of software in the world.  Enter the russians, asians and arabs. It’s a whole new WWW.

3 – Not every piece of advice and information online is valid;

(setting your internet cache to 80GB will get your computer in trouble)

Simply put, don’t believe every piece of information you read. Things that easy to confirm get corrected rapidly, but misinformation sometimes is used as a correction. Sometimes it will be the word of one expert against hundreds of misinformed users. Guess who wins.

4 – Anyone can be your friend. Anyone. Such that the word lost its classical meaning;

Here you see, adding nickname Nemesis, to the friends list. Curious little quirk. Yeah, online words are used freely. Not only do they have their meaning changed, but words, in their online usage change meaning in the real world.

5 – Spam isn’t a nice thing.

Spam will be spam, and as spam filters get smarter so will spammers. As long as 0,00001% of mailed people buy a product, unsolicited information will keep being sent.

These were all the results of copy, cut and paste. They are not montages. Hope you liked.

Was watching a chinese movie when this caption came up. Here’s the result.

Kids wearing boxers inside swim-trunks. Why do they do it. This explains why. Sort of.

This one is a bit far fetched, so for an explanation: it’s a pun on the European military rank Fourier and the mathematical Fourier Transform.

Inside me something
Keeps me from loving the sun.
I see it merely as light,
Merely as sun.

I want the rain and the cold
So in given time,
I’ll value your warmth.

Afraid of the early nightfall.
When I feel the cold,
I fear not feeling at all.

Who cares what’s good,
If there is no evil.
Just as faces in a postcard,
Don’t want it like this
But I am like this.

I fear the evil, but want it again.
More than a worn shoe,
I feel this is the end.

Bury all the pain and bones in your garden,
Ask the sky for some clouds to harden.

]]> http://y.estamine.net/main/?feed=rss2&p=34&lang=en 0 http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=19&lang=en http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=19&#comments&lang=en Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:01:00 +0000 fullmooninu http://y.estamine.net/main/?p=19&lang=en The story goes as this:

last.fm was a very cool website. It was free, it was hip, it kept getting better.

Add a few years and the free part is dropped out, as it often happens.

What does this wonderful site have that makes it so wonderful and worth me writing about it?

All it did, or its core fuction is to gather information about its users listening habits.  What do you listen to and when do you listen to it. From that it does the following:

• Customized radios: you can pick a genre, friend, yourself or an artist, and it will play either songs that are related to what you picked or simply popular concerning what you picked. This means that with the click of a button you can listen to your friends music collection. Or even, you could listen to a radio composed of your favorites songs. Or even just listen to radio that plays music you don’t know,  based on your tastes in regard to other similar users.

• Recommendations: As  mentioned before, last.fm can pickup what you like. It then finds similar users and recommends to you the stuff that they like, and that you don’t know about. It’s likely that this way you will find new music that you enjoy. Also, it will recommend concerts of band, based on your taste. A very popular feature, specially for Erasmus students and the like :O

And its basically this that makes last.fm so cool: costumized radios and recommendations.

Costumized radios were stripped away from the free version.  If you live in a rich (ad-saturaded) country like UK, US or Germany it’s still free.

Otherwise if  you are willing to pay the 3€ a month,  i think it is worth it.

Keeping it strictly free: the recommendations alone are a good reason to keep using this site.

Another reason that you might want to keep using this site and not another, is that so far, certain players, like Foobar and MusicIP, only support last.fm , and not other similar services.

Which leads us into our next question:
Are there any similar FREE services that are equal or better?

For me no. I use last.fm for recommendations and I use foobar as a player.

But i still like to listen to online radio.

So, testing a lot of the current available online radio services, i concluded the following:

They all suck.

Normal online radios are still the way to go. Just open your favorite Shoutcast stream in Foobar or other player and let the last.fm application store your listening habits for better recommendations.

As for the best online radio services, if you live in Europe you should go for Accuradio or Deezer.

Links here: Accuradio and Deezer.

For things like this you can get a Firefox lastfm plugin, like DAS – A Deezer to Last.fm bridge or LastFM Firefox Extension. Links here and here.  These will pass the tracks you listen to in  sites like Deezer to your lastfm account. LastFM Firefox Extension is clearly the best of the two as is supports more websites.

These sites don’t have the ability to learn what you like.  But the thematic radios are really good.

As a final note: if you live in the fatter richer countries you have more options, and you can use other recommendations services. But right now i don’t care to test them as i’m not in one of those Germanic nations.

But please, comment on this post and add your recommendations.

Hope this was useful.

and i was wondering about them. In particular about flags i am familiar with.

Are flags important? You bet they are. As Eddie Izzard puts it, “no flag no country“. You can’t declare you are a nation without a nation flag or something of the sort.

From here, i could go on and debate (or whatever you do when you talk to yourself) on what exactly is a country. But i’ll stick to flags as a symbol of a country.

And since there is a whole scholarly study dedicated to flags, I’ll restrict myself and stick to a flag i am familiar with.

Presenting, the Portuguese flag:

Interesting isn’t it?

Now, this thing is not very ancient. It’s from the beginning of the 20th century, when everyone thought it was a good idea to have a new flag.

Along with the new flag, they also installed a new political system.

That didn’t work very well, so people went on beating each other’s chin for 60 years after that.

But let’s stick to the flag. It’s supposed to be full of meaning, as flags usually are.

Actually, it turns out it is pretty much… random.

According to History (here represented by Wikipedia) a bunch of guys were told to meet, toss ideas around, and tell the painter guy to try them out.

And so, from that particular brainstorm, came the gentle breeze and the wavering flag in it.

The symbolism for this red and green with a blotch of yellow cloth is taught to children in Portugal as:

• Red:  is bloodshed and strife of patriots;

• Green:  is hope;

• Yellow: is a bunch of misc historic trivia.

Knowing and being able to explain this kind of stuff is enough to get you over elementary school.

Still, some people at the time the flag was made, went around writing that the flag was just an mismatch of the flags and insignias of the revolution sponsors.

Which is probably true.

But Stop!!

This is besides the point. The question I have in my mind is this:

If they decided green, red and yellow, or hope and patriotic bloodshed with lots of history are what best represents Portugal.. it should be plainly justified why.

Well.. i don’t think there is a why. It’s  pretty much a random construction after all. So one can only ask question regarding the construction of the flag, not the flag istelf.

So let’s say I can find out something else. Let’s pose a question.

Which is more important? Red or Green?

The yellow is centered. So I’ll leave him out.

The red and green. The red is in clear superiority. There is more red than gree in the flag, right? That makes it superior, right? Or doesn’t it?

Hope or bloodshed? Which is more important?

Until it hit me:

What do revolutions teach you? The very fundamental lesson?

What is the conclusion of every social stage?

What is the best way of solving everything? Fighting!!

Well.. what about Street Fighting?!

Yes! So here we go!

Green versus Red (with a blotch of yellow)

◊Fight!◊

◊ So here we have player Hope (using a green Ken) versus Bloodshed (using a red Ken).

◊ Hope is usually absent-minded. He went to the bathroom and Bloodshed started whooping his ass.

◊ But, some fights after, when Hope finally comes back from the bathroom, we find out that Bloodshed is a Street Fighter Alpha 3 noob that never heard of parrying.

◊ From there on, Hope kicked Bloodshed‘s ass.

In conclusion, the Green is of course the most important part of the Portuguese flag. Because of this historic Street Fighter 3 match.

Thank you for reading.

As a side not, i think this method is as valid as those used to pick and construct a flag:  any flag.

Well, i was messing around after purchasing MusicIP and figured i should alter this massive wall of text to something less scary.
So i was thinkingi should make two versions.

So… here’s the thing, im gona actually produce a light tutorial on music organizing, all centered on MusicIP. MusicIP is like, ossum, and puts everything else the web has to offer out on a corner.

I’ll try to explain why. As in the previous version of this tutorial it had little exposure.

Alpha Quick and Dirty Version

Okay Guys, I was telling some of you folks i would write some tutorials for this and that.

So here’s what, im going to do one right now… watch it grow while i use this forum as an excuse for the hiatus

It’s mainly directed to the organizing of MP3 files, mostly because thats what the gross of my collection is, and because MP3 files, still present a very good quality/size ratio – specially when you are speaking about a LameMP3 encode at 192kbps (which is what i consider the current “sweet spot” for audio files, by the way)

First of all, you have to understand how i think: I like my music files to be properly organized, i make sure they aren’t corrupt, aren’t low quality and that i don’t have any duplicates in my collection.

I organize music using only two factors. Artist and Track title.

Some people like to work with Albums, others like to work with Genres.

Nonetheless, this guide can help you organize your music, whatever the way you prefer it to be organized.

The steps are basically these, in which i think is the most logical order:

1- Set file attributes
2- Check for duplicates
3- Check for corruption
4- Check for quality
5- Reversible Normalize
6- Tag and Organize
7- Generate Smart Playlists, using spectrum analysis
8- Check for duplicates and errors, using spectrum analysis.

Reasoning:

So, we’re going to work with your mp3 files.

We must prepare them first. Don’t want to get any errors further on because some of them are set as read-only files.

This will be a quick tutorial on how to set attributes in a windows environment.

Example of Method:

Lets say I keep all my organized music files inside directory d:\music\ and my unorganized (and fresh) music files inside d:\downloads\music

Open a command shell and write:

example:

attrib  -R +A -S -H d:\music\*.mp3  /s

This will set the proper file attributes for all mp3 files inside the directory d:\music and respective subdirectories.

Do the same for the other directories:

attrib  -R +A -S -H d:\downloads\music\*.mp3  /s

And for other file types you may have

attrib  -R +A -S -H d:\downloads\music\*.ogg  /s

Advantages:

By doing this you will be decreasing the errors you will have to deal with when you further organize your collection

Disadvantages:

None.

This is probably the most basic thing you can do for any collection.

There are lots of pieces of software than can detect file duplicates. Just use anyone your familiar with.

Make sure you only delete exact duplicates, and always try to keep the one with the file name that is the most correct and delete the others.

I like to use CloneSpy http://www.clonespy.com/

Download and install the latest stable version, and open it.

Go to File -> Options -> Files

Enable Restrict to files or file patterns , and Add Mask. Type in *.mp3 , *.ogg , *.wma , *.flac , etc .

You should have something like this.

Leave everything else in default for now. Click Add Folder, and all all the folders that contain your audio collection. Subdirectories are included by default, no need to add those.

You should get something like this:

Just click on Start Scanning.

Voilá! Our first duplicate. Just select all but one, and click on Delete all marked files.

Keep deleting the duplicates until the scan is complete. Clonespy allows an automatic procedure, but i would recommend you try it the manual way first.

Advantages:

By doing this first, you will be cleaning your collection of duplicates, reducing the number of files you have to deal with, get more free space on your hard disk, and  will avoid errors further on such as filename collisions.

Disadvantages:

- If you have a huge collection this should take you a while.

- Let’s say you have the exact mp3 file, but with 2 different ID tags: Clonespy will not see it as a duplicate.

Tip:

You just got an audio file. How do you make sure its not corrupted ?

You probably have a few of these lingering around your collection. Files that when played, give out a *beep* or a *blop* here and there.

You’ll want to check your files for errors.

I’ve tested a few pieces of software created for this purpose. Right now i only trust  Checkmate MP3 checker http://checkmate.linuxonly.nl/

I only care about doing this step for MP3 files. The reason being my collection dates back to Napster days and as such i built it from .mp3 files and rips off my CD collection, but mostly because i never found any good generic error checking software.

Download the latest stable version, install and let’s use it.

Go to a directory containing MP3 files. I recommend using this in your default download directory, where you probably have a lot of mp3 files lingering.

Select them all, by doing the default english Windows “select all” command  Ctrl+A – this way the program only selects all .mp3 files

Press Enter

In this example, we found two corrupted mp3 files.

The problems that will be detected by checkmate

- Broken, resulting from errors in encoding or a broken file

- Not a mp3 file, this means your file isn’t a mp3. Some of these wont even be music files. Try and play these with your player and check their properties.

Checkmate will detect errors. But it wont fix them.

If you want to improve your collection, you should:

If broken: get a new clean version of the song from somewhere and delete your old one;

If invalid: find out the real extension for the file and change it.. or get a new clean version of it, and delete the old one.

Advantages:

- Cleaning your collection of corrupted files and files with an invalid extension, is a good way of improving the overall quality, and to avoid further errors when organizing your files.

Disadvantages:

- You should have noticed a thing: this softwarei recommend is still in development in terms of everything but mp3 error checking – in which it excels.

The worse part being: It’s not capable of working with subdirectories, so you will have to analyze all your music directories one by one.

For a big collection, this will take ages. So unless you’re really patient, you can skip this step.

In the end of this tutorial, there will be presented another way of checking for errors in all your files – but this other way is more a complement than a replacement, as the algorithm is not as good as this one.

Tip:

I use this software to check new mp3, before i move them to my collection. I definitely recommend this approach.

Ill try and add some other software for this function later. Recommendations are warmly accepted

Still about neatness.

This is the part where we check the general quality of your collection.

We checked for file corruption, now we check for quality.

The software for this?

Encspot, by GuerillaSoft

They released this for years, and it had a Free and Professional, paid version.
But before they went under, they released the paid version as free ware.

They dont have an official site anymore, and a quick Google search couldn’t find the latest version, so i cant put a link here right now. Will appreciate some help finding the file (or hosting the file, private message me if you wana)

So, download enc spot pro and install it

It will ask for a serial, which was provided for free by guerillasoft. (this will be included in the download)

Now, this piece of software is on another level….

It will read the first frames of every mp3 you feed it, and tell you its properties, including: its relative quality.

So select a dir and check it out.

Green means good, red means bad, yellow is so so.

This scale is based on used encoder and file bitrate.

What you do is: browse through your collection (doesn’t support subdirectories), and check out the red files. You should really replace these with better quality versions.

You’ll realize, if you have no experience in this, that you had an actual tendency for liking the songs in red less, and liking the songs in green more.

Amazing, isn’t it ? One of the factors that makes you like a music file less, is its inferior quality.

Same could be said about the songs that have errors and the songs that don’t.

Proof: If you ask someone to make a compilation of their favorite mp3, they will give you a sample of their collection that contains a lot LESS broken files and bad quality files than the overall average in their collection

You’ll want to remake your collection by getting better (error free versions of these songs) and then AFTER listening to the better version,  you can delete the inferior scum -_-

Joy.

At this point you’ll realize you’re deleting some corrupt songs and inferior quality songs and not getting replacements…  this means you never really liked them.
Unless you’re one of those guys that collects albums instead of songs, this will actually be a good thing: this is also organizing your collection.

Advantages:

- Getting better sounding versions of inferior quality songs.

Disadvantages:

- Since this is a very manual thing, you’ll probably want to be relaxed about it, and do it bit by bit.

Tip: when you have two versions of the same song, that dont check out as true duplicate, this is the software you should use to see which is the better version

Problem: some music files are louder, some are quieter. When playing them, either you analyze them beforehand so they play at the same volume, or you’ll eventually have to reach for the volume.

This is where you make all your MP3 the same mean volume, so you wont have to keep changing the volume when you pass from a loud song to a more silent one.

The reversible means the process is completely lossless in the sense that it can be undone without any loss of information.

Note: This is NOT the way music is played in CDs. In CDs some tracks are louder and others are more silent. But this not practical for a large collection played on shuffle.

For this i recommend MP3Gain http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

Download the latest stable version, install it and open it.

Now, let’s set it right

The default value mean sound is 89dB

I find this too low for must uses, so i recommend you set it to 91dB

In the options make sure the “subdirectorios” and “dont clip when applying gain” options are set

Add a directory.

Keep adding all the directories you want. Add your whole drives (C: D: ) if you want.

Then press Track Analysis

When finished, the log report will certainly report a few error files. The files in the log report will not be normalized because MP3Gain will report them as containing errors or not being valid mp3 files. They are a minority but if you have the patience you can investigate those files with an error checker or a quality checker and see whats up. 

After the analysis is finished, and you had a quick look at the error report (if any), press the apply Track Gain and MP3Gain will now finally work on your, normalizing your entire collection. You can try this with different gains, if you find 91dB to be too low or too high.

So you got a bunch of files, spread everywhere, some with incorrect names, some with incorrect artist and trackname, most of them have a filename format you don’t like, and you want to fix this ?

Sure, you could just add them to a media library, and use that to find the files whenever you wanted. But you’ll still have lots of incorrect information about.

Well, you could correct the information yourself.

But why should you, if you can use an online database to do it for you.   

Meet Music Brainz.

Music Brainz is a tagger that uses a checksum database and checks for file similarity. The checksum (and file profile) are submitted to the database (that withstands by holding info on most mp3 file in the world). The files are identified by album and artist and whatnot, and it gives the file the proper tag, filename and even a directory of its own. All of which can be configured to your taste.

Sweet non ?

I think so. *schlerp* Really sweet.

For the newfags: This technology was initially applied on a software called Moodlogic, which also generated smartplaylists. But thats another topic. I was there on the dead Moodlogic forums when it happened: the brain behind the moodlogic technology went to work for amazon.com (traitor =O) so they could increase their profits and a few starving guys joined together to create musicbrainz as an alternative.

I watched this baby grow, and have my way of using it. Ill provide as an example my personal way of doing it:

Go to the MusicBrainz webpage http://musicbrainz.org/

Make an account – you are going to need it later.

You could use mine, but i don’t want you to.  Get your own.

There’s several programs that access the MusicBrainz database. You can take your pick. I’m going to go for the free one: Picard Tagger

Download and install the latest stable version.

Open it and we’re going to configure it now.

Make sure you grant it access to the web, this is just a client for the database. Without the internets it’s worthless.

Go to the menu Options->Options

General:

Type in that login and password you got when registering at the site.

Also select auto

Metadata:

I like to “translate foreign artist names to english where possible”

leave the rest in default

Tags:

You can leave it in default: attention, some players, mostly portable ones, dont like the default text encoding, utf-8. But ill update this part later. For now just leave everything as default.

Cover art:

Fuck cover art, i disable this. But if you want jpeg files hidden inside your mp3 files, it’s up to you.

File naming:

The good stuff. Now dont get scared. It’s just bit of script with just a few possible variables.

Click the preview button to see how a mp3 file will be renamed, by default.

Looks good ?

I dont think so, i like my files to be like this Artist-Songname.mp3 .

This is because i personally just want the filename to tell me these two things. Who is playing and what they/he/she is playing.

Some people like to read more things from teh file name. Year, album, gender and all that.

It’s about personal taste. And for simplicity effect it’s what i recommend.

If you click the help button and then click on file naming you’ll get instruction on how to change the result to whatever you like.

Don’t forget to click the preview button to see if it works.

Plus, it is also in this field that you can work out the magic to organize a completely unorganied music collection, just by using the default values, and activating the Move Files option, musicbrainz can organize all your mp3 files, neatly by directory, give them a proper filename and proper tag.

The default is $if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) %title%

im going to translate this

It says, if there’s an recognizable artist for the album of the song, create a directory with the name of the artist, then create a subdirectory with the name of the album, then move the file there and change it to: track number(with two digits) title of the song. (like in the example).

If there isnt a recognizable artist for the album, just create a directory with the name of the artist of that track, then create a subdirectory with the name of the album and the rest is the same

I dont like this, so ill change it to the values i like.

If i was dealing with a completely unorganized collection i would select this.

%artist%/%artist-%title%

and select a folder to move your collection to.

This way only 1 directory will be created per artist, and its a lot easier to navigate IMO.

If the collection is already organized in a certain way. Just use the %artist-%title% thing i recommend, and dont select move files.

If you liked the default way of changing the filename but dont want it to be moving your songs about, change it to %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) %title%

I also select “replace non-ascii” characters, but thats because i dont like it when some players cant read this. You know these right? Stuff like é and õ and â and the like, are replaced by their more simple incorrect versions without acentuation.

And You’re done…

Close options.

Let’s try it out.

Select add folder.

Select a folder with a few songs, let’s essay the result before going for your full collection, mm kay ?

They should be added in the left column

Select a few and click scan.

They mostly should be identified, and moved to the right window.

Select all the albums and click “save”.

The files will be renamed and tagged properly. (unless they are not well identified, which can happen sometimes)
They will also be neatly organized by folders, if you asked for it.

So go and see for yourself.

So now you got yourself a error free, true duplicate free, properly tagged and organized collection.

Im proud of you, Junior.

So what can you do with it ?

Good question.

How about we process your collection to a database based on song similarty and start generating playlists from that database based.

This is, we can select a few songs from the database that includes all the musics in your pc, and from those we can select a playlist that includes 20 or 30 songs that similar to that one?

Pretty sweet, i think *schlerp*

Now,

we’re gona use the latest version of this technology, MusicIP Mixer

http://www.musicip.com/

Download and install the latest stable version of musicip mixer.

The free version is just fine, even with the 75 song per mix limit, i think. But the pro version has its advantages.

Open it

Since this is the first time you use it, it will ask you for the folder where you keep your music

It’s irrevelant if you give it one or not. You can do it later.

The place to add songs to the library is in

Library -> Add songs

Just add some songs, and it will start working. Attention, part of its database generating engine is online, so for adding songs to your database you need an internet connection.

Leave it working on your songs and let’s check out the options.

There is some stuff you can do in the Options, but nothing special, so let’s just use the defaults.

Just select a song or songs, and you can click the mix button to generate a mix from those songs.

Even the shuffle is intelligent instead of random. By default the program tries to minize the variance between songs in a shuffle.

Then press play and start enjoying your collection

MusicIP Mixer is a great mix creator and what i use as default player.

But it does a lot more..

For instances, it can actually use the similarity database to find duplicate songs. The songs that arent real file duplicates but are 2 different encodes of the same song ?

No problem for MusicIP just select Library->List Duplicates

If you click List unalysable it will list all the songs with errors, that should be deleted and replaced.

(not all of them are error songs, Unalysable songs are sometimes songs that are identified as non music)

Finally, if you configure the options accordingly, you can use the Fix Tags button to tag your files properly. This is the best Tag fixer around. It will find without error the names, tracks, albums, year and genre of  most of the songs everywhere.

It will tag UTF names properly, but the catch is. It doesn’t work that well with UTF, so it has a slight problem with Asian filenames =/.

On the other hand, picard tries to convert Asian chars to ASCII. So i guess thats a bit of a gray area.

Other than that, if there is one software of all these that i recommend, its MusicIP

It’s that good.

Well, some of it is very far-fetched, and i recon we have amassed some useful knowledge.

This is the place where we will post some of that stuff.

There are a couple of rules we will use:

1) we don’t do it for popularity

2) don’t’ post about posts

3) original articles first

4) avoid reviews

5) avoid talking about recent events

6) avoid the hype

new rules will appear