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107 posts with category “Tech”

A Flat Hierarchy for Subjective mp3 Tags

I’ve always been anal about the way my mp3s are tagged. Before the iPod, Audioscrobbler, and foobar2000, it was an irrational obsession, since I keep my music well-sorted on my hard drive. But there’s something so “official” about mp3 tags that I find appealing.

A few years ago this fixation extended to a program called MoodLogic, which applies a user-maintained database of really specific information about songs to construct playlists to match particular moods. In the end it proved more work than it was worth for me, so I abandoned it, but I’ve always wished for a similarly intuitive method of music browsing and playlist creation (come on, alphabetically?).

The genre tag has always been the most elusive. The subjective if not totally baseless distinctions between “Pop/Rock,” “Rock,” and “Pop” are enough to aggravate even the mildest case of OCD. I never bothered with this kind of categorization until recently when I realized that foobar2000 can handle multiple values for one tag field. Interesting…

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MST128K

Talk to JOEL!My life in the past few days has been overtaken by MST3K. I discovered that there’s a video version of Winamp’s ShoutCast, with some channels streaming tv shows 24 hours a day. Two of these channels stream MST3K, and though the streams are usually maxed out on viewers, for $4 my IP is on the VIP list of this stream, which means uninterrupted MST3K until March 31.

When a KTMA-era mini-marathon was scheduled last weekend, I knew I had to “tape” it. I probably could have guessed that these episodes are readily available via various p2p outlets, but I also would have guessed (rightly) that the files are kept extremely large for the sake of quality. Ideally I wanted to save video from the stream in very low quality; nearly all of an MST3K episode is silhouettes and bad movies anyway, so this could hardly be considered “compromise.”

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Firefox, video, MST3K

Joel

I still don’t get why Firefox is better and more popular than Mozilla ever was, but okay, I’ll play along. Especially given these enhancements:

  • Cookie Button: one of the best features of Mozilla that inexplicably didn’t make it to Firefox.
  • Flashblock: Only see Flash when you want to! This is a miracle.

Finally found a video player to be happy with: Media Player Classic. It’s also bundled with Real Alternative, which allows you to play Real format files without relying on the nightmarish RealOne player. This week I also discovered Net Transport, which does the best (i.e., quickest, easiest, and most free) job of saving streaming video I’ve seen so far. And finally, MST3K is still kicking: there’s this gigantic reference site, the still-existent info club, and a legally ambiguous ShoutCast video stream. Shhhhhhhh.

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