'Til All Are One

Simon and Lind­say: EasyTAG is indeed a use­ful tool for tag­ging many music files at once. While EasyTAG does auto­mate a lot of the work, it is still quite a labor­i­ous pro­cess. This really grinds when you’re try­ing to man­age a large music col­lec­tion. What if your tag­ger worked more like your ears and brain — it just listened to the music and worked out what song was playing?

Enter Picard, stage left.

Picard ‘listens’ to your music and ascer­tains an audio fin­ger­print of each track. Using this inform­a­tion, along with more tra­di­tional data such as exist­ing file­names and tags, it con­sults vari­ous online sources to deduce the details of the track and pop­u­late the metadata fields. I’ve found the res­ults to be amaz­ingly accur­ate. Some­times it finds mul­tiple matches, and it can occa­sion­ally get con­fused if the same track is avail­able on dif­fer­ent albums (e.g. a single, an ori­ginal album and a ‘best-​​of’ com­pil­a­tion). If you have some idea of what the track is, you can lend Picard a hand by manu­ally adding a more use­ful file­name or some tags. This is where EasyTAG works well with Picard, since Picard isn’t geared towards manual tag edit­ing. Still, it’s bloody impress­ive nonetheless.

As an album-​​based tag­ger, Picard behaves some­what dif­fer­ently from file-​​based tag­gers like EasyTAG. It can take some get­ting used to, and it might be less accur­ate for people who prefer to col­lect single songs and not entire albums. If you’re like me and do com­pile full albums, it can do clever things like ascer­tain that you have the ‘White Album’ (or part of it) if it sees ‘While My Gui­tar Gently Weeps’ as well as ‘Revolu­tion 9′. The developers have recog­nised that the UI does need some love, but once you’re used to it it isn’t too bad.

Picard is a mass-​​tagger, so drag a whole stack of music files onto it and watch it do its work. It’ll try and group your music into albums. To cor­rect alloc­a­tions, drag their entries to arrange them in the way you please (or drag them away if noth­ing is suit­able). Depend­ing on how eso­teric your music tastes are, you should find that most tracks are handled fairly accur­ately. If you sign up for a MusicBrainz account, you can sub­mit your changes for oth­ers to benefit.

Addendum: If you’re using Ubuntu, don’t for­get to install libtunepimp5-​​mp3 for MP3 support.

LotD: Excel­lent speech by Nich­olas Negro­ponte on One Laptop Per Child. I would espe­cially recom­mend that the naysay­ers listen to it.

The unholy com­bin­a­tion of work and study have devoured me over the past month.

One point of men­tion is an inter­view I had with James Purser for Open Source On The Air. Hav­ing never been inter­viewed before, I was rather nervous. I was also wait­ing to be accep­ted or declined as an Ubuntu Mem­ber at the Com­munity Coun­cil meet­ing, which only increased my anxi­ety. It also didn’t help that it was past 10pm, and I was suf­fer­ing from a lack of sleep. If I sound dopey, please keep those points in mind. With that dis­claimer announced, I think I con­duc­ted myself quite well.

In other news, I’m glad to hear that my nom­in­a­tion of Elk­buntu for the Linux Aus­tralia People’s Choice Com­munity Mem­ber of the Year Award (wow, that’s a mouth­ful!) was heeded. Con­grat­u­la­tions, Melissa! I am look­ing for­ward to drink­ing that beer!

Link of the day: Paris Hilton vomits while singing

They say that the first step towards deal­ing with an addic­tion is admit­ting that you have one. For that pur­pose, I have a con­fes­sion to make: I am addicted to Open Source On The Air. For the unini­ti­ated, OSOTA is a weekly Inter­net radio pro­gramme hos­ted by James and Karin Purser. Being based in Aus­tralia, this pod­cast focuses mainly on issues affect­ing the Aus­tralian FLOSS com­munity. It is broad­cast live on Wed­nes­days from 21:30 (UTC+1000). Besides being a great show in its own right (even if down­loaded after­wards), I love how I can hang out in #loc­alfoss on irc​.freen​ode​.net and provide input while the show is run­ning live. It is this sort of inter­ac­tion that makes free soft­ware so great.

A few weeks ago, Karin decided to announce a com­pet­i­tion. The ques­tion was simple: to sug­gest a ques­tion for a future com­pet­i­tion. An idea sprung to mind fairly quickly, and I men­tioned it over IRC to James. I neg­lected to e-​​mail it, how­ever, and when Karin announced the fol­low­ing week that she had not received any entries, I real­ised that I had com­pletely for­got­ten my idea. The eph­em­eral nature of IRC meant that I couldn’t just look it up (my logs were only short-​​term — curses!). I spent a day and a night wrack­ing my brain before it resur­faced. I pos­ted it to James, and the fol­low­ing week it was announced that I was a win­ner! Mind you, there were only two entries, and both were deemed to be win­ners

The fol­low­ing week, I received my loot: a plush Tux pen­guin and an O’Reilly Linux Ana­tomy poster. At the request of James, I sent him a pho­to­graph of myself with my new pen­guin friend. Fit­tingly, it was taken just prior to a SLUG meet­ing, and in it I’m wear­ing my Soft­ware Free­dom Day 2006 T-​​shirt.

So what was my entry? It’s prob­ably best that I don’t spoil the sur­prise. Stay tuned for it to be announced on Open Source On The Air!

Unlike my last post, this one is ser­i­ous. One of my favour­ite podac­sts, The Linux Link Tech Show, inter­viewed RSI expert Deborah Quilter. The phe­nomenon of RSI has risen to prom­in­ence in recent years, largely in response to increas­ing com­puter use. That puts tech work­ers such as myself in con­sid­er­able risk of devel­op­ing injur­ies, and in fact I am cer­tain that I have developed some already. Ignor­ing the prob­lem only makes it worse. Any­one who works at a desk should listen to this inter­view and heed at least some of its warn­ings and advice.

The epis­ode is avail­able in Ogg Vor­bis and MP3 formats.