Join Daniel as he unboxes the new camera that will be used to film all of Tech65’s future productions, the Sanyo Xacti HD1000, as well as find out why he chose this camera for that purpose.
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Warehouse123 HD1000 page
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So Adobe just launched CS4 in Singapore last Friday, and now Daniel just can’t stop talking about it. To be honest, if you’re a heavy user of adobe products, you’ll be as impressed as Daniel was. Fortunately, if you’re not, there’s always the show notes to help you skip Daniel’s “omigosh, omigosh!”s to hear about stream computing, mobile operating systems and how to have video conversations right inside your browser, because we’re all more geek than designer. NTT more than anyone else.
Oh, and “rm -r /” to you too!*
Daniel, NTT (welcome back!), Farinelli and DK.
*Refer to [40:55]
This week, the guest-hosts outnumber the hosts as Dan takes on Hishm, DK and Nicole. In the 1st round they fight it out talking about Street Directory and other mapping services; an upcoming line of laptops from Sony which Sony previewed to bloggers this weeks. The second round starts with Cuil (pronounced as ‘Kool’), a search engine which claims to better the big G and ends a stixy collaboration tool!! Listen to the show know who wins!!
If you’re like me, then you enjoy having a well-tagged music collection. All those MP3s’ filenames accurately named with a certain system [eg Album - Artiste - Track - Title.mp3] and also the metadata tags, chockful of all the information that you’ll ever need to drill down to your favourites as your collection grows larger.
For a more personal reason, I’d say this act of renaming actually brings you closer to your music and *nothing* beats the adrenaline buzz of knowing which artist sang the best of 5 renditions of your favourite song.
Unlike digital downloads, CD-Rips, my #1 source of music have very bad names by default [Unknown Album - Unknown Artist - Track 01.mp3]. Also, they’re probably missing album artwork that’ll look good and give function to iTunes Coverflow. A simple rename in iTunes or other jukeboxes usually does the trick, but only the metadata is changed, not the actual filenames themselves. Also some jukeboxes are so unintuitive that the metadata is maintained externally, meaning every reformat or uninstall deletes your changes.
That’s why I use, and recommend MP3Tag. This is THE best tagging utility I’ve ever seen and in the latest version, supports album artwork. Too many other tagging utilities try to do too much and fail miserably at all of them, including a potentially powerful but horribly clunky Godfather.
MP3tag is a lean machine, that focuses on only one thing and does it very well. Although there is no in-house mp3 player, it will automatically call up your default player so you can preview first before you decide to expend any energy renaming it. For a low memory-footprint player ideally suited for the task, try Billy.
The beauty of MP3Tag lies in its shortcuts, both keyboard and hardcoded.
The hardcodes first:
The keyboard shortcuts allow for easy renaming and even file management from within the app itself. For example, deleting a file is possible and this action removes a file from the “playlist”. However a combo Ctrl-Del sends the file packing to the Recycle Bin, from the app itself. No need to muck around and switch from app to File Explorer just to delete an unwanted file. There are many other keyboard shortcuts ideally suited for productivity.
For now the album art has to dragged in manually for every album that doesn’t already have one, but I suspect future version will have the capability to query Amazon for artwork. Besides, it’s GPL’d code, so anyone can pick up and add in the featureset. I would, if I knew how.
Now although MP3Tag is a Windows application, I’ve successfully used it under Wine and Crossover and it works like a champ, so Linux and Mac users will get some love too.
Back when sharing wasn’t taboo, a few files must’ve ended up in your collection with questionable or non-specific non-descript filenames. It’d be hard to identify the tracks especially if you’ve never heard them before. Maybe googling the lyrics is an option, but what about instrumental tracks?
There’s a specialised program from the minds over at the MusicBrainz project that uses acoustic fingerprinting. Picard samples a small section of the dubious files and mathematically narrows down the possibilities to a list of complete metadata you can choose from. In my experience, the list is somewhat accurate, but only for English titles. YMMV.
Album art was no doubt made massively popular by iTunes’ Coverflow. A lot of people had a few tracks with embedded album art before that, but Coverflow made a purely decorative piece of metadata into an enjoyable interface. The problem now is to add album art to the many tracks that don’t already have them. Trust me, I’ve tried and it’s a daunting task.
For Mac users, Fetch Art makes things infinitely easier. The whole process is automated, just get the script running and leave your computer alone for a while. However there are a few misses, especially because Fetch Art is very particular about metadata when it queries Amazom servers.
For Windows, currently I use Album Art Aggregator. I can’t say if this is the best program for this purpose, but I make do. For the really elusive covers, try Albumart.org, a manual search engine.
These are at best good alternatives while we await a native Sinagporean iTunes online Store, thus giving instant access to automatic high-res album art.
What’re you waiting for? Get your music organized. You won’t regret it.
Naveen
This is 65bits and you’re listening to us live from the Singapore Science Center, through the interwebs. We begin this week’s episode with a piece of art that was stolen. It appears to have shown up however on Creative’s new product, the Zen Mosaic. We’re also impressed with the products that are coming out of the company that is Hewlett Packard. There’re reports that these products have been bewitched by a specific cult known in some circles as “Voodoo”. We are standing by and providing updates as they roll in.
All the People listen to 65bits,
NTT and Daniel
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OH YEAH Babie! We’re Ping’s 2nd Anniversary Podcast of the year! And so we begin on an appropriate note with a nice big YYYYEEEAAAYYYYY!!!!! We’re blown away with all the new things that are before us from E3, Microsoft’s new Xbox console interface, all the other consoles have revealed fabulous new toys and Intel unleashes upon us speed bumps with a drop in power consumption for their laptops. And most importantly we say, YYYYYAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY. Congratulations to… US! and all the other winners on Ping.sg Blog Awards..
Yours Smilingly,
Fabbo, Flabbo, and the Province of Fantastico.
This week we were only able to provide you with the sweet sounds of Macbook microphone recordings and that is all. Nevertheless it comes filled to the gills with sweet sweet tech news. Of both the iPhone sort and the any other possible sort of news kind of news. Such as Creative’s new Zen X-Fi. Which looks to be quite a competitor to the Colossus that is the iPod. We’re in awe at hard drives with awesome capacities and last but certainly not the least, Google has decided that it’ll get into that whole “second life” thingy with Lively!
With honor and valor (blehh)
The Recruit, The Driver, The Desk Jockey
This week’s episode is brought to you because we love you listeners. We talk about providing technologies to those with disabilities to help them use technology more effectively. Creative is going to release the iPod Killer… again. We look at Hong Kong’s pricing policies for the iPhone and what that means for us in Singapore and it looks like its gonna be the calm before the storm for those Diablo lovers out there as Diablo 3 is coming out soon! Those security minded folk out there also have a new way to log into your WoW account!
We love ya!
Satay, Stingray and Roti Prata
We actually had no idea until recently that we’ve been nominated as the top 5 podcast on the singapore blog aggregator Ping.sg! So help vote for us! We’re known as “Tech65 by 65bits” (I know it’s reversed, but we never expected to do more than 65bits when we first joined Ping.sg…) in the nomination page.
Thanks so much for your support and your votes!!
Daniel Tsou
Some people live forever, immortalised by the greatness they have inspired or the people they’ve destroyed. Bill Gates is a man who arguably has done both in the tech industry. We drool and gush over HP’s newest and sexehest PC, the HP Touchsmart. You can now rest assured that someone is working to ensure that those who want to apply Creative Commons to their work will soon be able to do so. Nasi Lemak style! We love Microsoft’s extended love for XP, and Nokia’s arms wide open embrace of Open Sauce. Mmm Teriyaki.
Loving Each Day,
The Jedi, The Airplane and the Pokémon
I’m actually surprised no one has noticed this yet. Blizzard unveiled Diablo III today at the Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational. I could dig up all the new features of Diablo III and tell them to you, but where’s the fun in that?
Here’s the link to the Official Diablo 3 website to discover for yourself
And here’s a summary of the new game:
Twenty years have passed since the cataclysmic events of Diablo® II. Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal have been defeated, but the Worldstone, which once shielded the world of Sanctuary from the forces of both the High Heavens and the Burning Hells, has been destroyed, and evil once again stirs in Tristram….
Jerrick and NTT will definitely have lots to say about this new game on Episode 78 of 65bits… 
The future is here and its an open secret. Apple has unveiled the way it plans to make all applications online, and we don’t even know about it. Sproutcore’s its name, and we can wait to see what it does. Youtube launched a thing specially for its Partners, we talk about all the iPhone wannabes and killers and wonder if they do or do not actually match up, and question the future of graphics cards/processors/kitchen sinks. Lastly, Singapore Airlines makes a very BLOCKY impression on us.
Tupolev, Iluyushin, Fokker
