meddlingBanter

While watching commandN they mention USC recently conducted a study of the various blogging tools available to the masses. Here’s the comparison chart.

On the subject of blogging tools and various other content managment systems is opensourcecms.com. This site lets you test the vast arrary of CMS’s available. Very helpful for those looking for the right tool for the job, or just to get a taste of whats out there. Whether you’re looking for a blogging tool or Portal (CMS) finding out which one is best for you has never been easier.

In a previous post I mentioned a program called iArt. Well this program works very well for its purpose, the whole process takes a long time because you can only load a playlist or your entire library. For the sake of keeping things managable and not having to go through 7,000 songs all at once I would load up a couple of artists into a new playlist and add the art that way. It was much easier to keep track of things that way.

Via this digg story I found a similar program, but it is a plugin for iTunes called iTunes Art Importer. Not the cleverist name, but I’ll give it a test run shortly and maybe update my blog here to let others know how it works.

Update: Well, it works very well. Its not a plugin though, just a small program. Things I like. Clicking on the album art when you do a search brings you to the album page on amazon.com. To search for cover art you need not create playlists or select your entire library. Simply highlight a song in your iTunes library or playlists and click the search button in the program. Also allows for manual over ride incase your id3 tags don’t quite match up with listings on Amazon.

So in honor of the first manned Moon landing on July 20, 1969(huh huh, you said 69), google created Google Moon. Proof the moon really is made out of cheese (Hint: Zoom in all the way).

Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals tomorrow night in Royal Oak. Oh how wonderful this weekend is going to be:)

If you happen to be a usenet person and a firefox user(which site stats suggest you are) then the following link may be of some use to you. Its a search plugin for Firefox which allows you to search newzbin.com’s database of usenet posts. Very cool indeed.

link

I’ve been wanting to go through my music library for quite some time and number one, get rid of all the crap I don’t listen to and as an added bonus do some cleaning up of the ID3 tags as well as how each file is named. The other day I was looking for various iTunes plugins via the mighty search master google and came across audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler works in conjuction with almost any music player out there. I personally like to use iTunes (windows) and so I downloaded the audioscrobbler iTunes plugin. Once installed you must first sign up for audioscrobbler at their website, then enter your username and password information into the plugin the next time you start iTunes. Now every song you listen to in iTunes is tracked at audioscrobbler. Others can view what you’re listening to or what you have been listening to which is a pretty cool feature. Also every once and a while you will get new reccommendations of music to listen to from others with you’re interests. Very cool indeed.

I have quite a few MP3’s and sorting through them can be a pain. Many of them show up in iTunes out of order because the ID3 tags are either wrong, or non existant. This annoys me greatly so I finally decided to do something about it. I one day hope to have an iPod too so having perfectly marked ID3 tags will make searching for music much easier in the long run with most portable devices using ID3 tags for searching. The solution to all my problems is called MusicBrainz Tagger. From the website:

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your MP3 collections. Find out more in the introduction.

Here’s some before and after shots of my AFI music directory:
Before

After

MusicBrainz interface:

Musicbrainz is the best tagger I’ve used yet. I espesically like how it renames and tags your MP3s in one step. Mp3’s which have no match in the musicbrainz database can be searched for manually and then either tagged based on similar songs or submitted to the Musicbrainz database.

Since I have a lot of albums and iTunes allows you to view album art for the current playing song I went in search of a program that would automatically add album art to MP3’s. What I found is called iArt. iArt works with iTunes scripting feature, so iTunes must be running to use the program. Once started you can load your entire library or playlists into iArt depending on your need. iArt will then look for the album cover of each song on Amazon and download it to your computer automatically for viewing in iTunes. I used to think album art was stupid, but this makes it so easy to add I just have to do it now.

Once all this is done you’ll need more music to tag and find cover art for so I would reccomend AllofMP3.com for that. Cheap music in almost any quality you could ask for.