Hey there. Farinelli here. So um, the hamsters did in fact revolt again, nearly destroyed the episode but my l33t skills saved it somehow, and I’m basically left to apologize for the volume issues in this episode. You do not want to know what happened while I was working on this episode. And even if you do want to know, I don’t want to tell you. What I will tell you though, is that this week’s episode focuses on the last, newest, and debatably the most promising of the big 4 smartphone OSs – Google Android. Zi Yong from CodeAndroid joins us in sharing with you the pros (what, what cons?) of the Android system – what it has brought to the table, what companies have done, and what will be done with it in the near future. Be sure to catch the next episode as we do a grand wrap-up of what we have discussed in the past four weeks. Guess who’s back.

WANT TO FIGHT? WANT TO FIGHT?!

Daniel, DK, Fari, w/ Zi Yong

Refresh:
[2:20] Windows 7 Upgrade Options
[5:12] Tiny SG made MP3 Player Easy on the Wallet
[7:23] Amazing UK Plug Design
[10:56] Adsense Comes to Mobile
[12:43] MJ’s Death Brings Down Several Websites

[14:40] Android Discussion + HTC Hero

[33:25] BOTW: H1N1 Mask App

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:

1. Multiple files with the same metadata can be easily edited all the same time. Album artwork can be added this way too, so this is ideal for entire albums before adding them to your collection.
2. This is one of the few programs that allows the filename to be changed in the same way and in the same place tags are changed. This is undeniably a useful feature that I don’t see even in say..iTunes?
3. It is possible in MP3Tag to easily convert filenames to mp3 tags and vice versa. So if you just spent the past hour updating the album names and the artist information for music from various sources and albums, a simple right click to choose the convert option [either tag -> filename or filename -> tag] will bring up a menu that will confirm your preference for data to be present in renaming. The placeholder tags are easy and intuitive [eg %artist%, %album% etc], and there’s a preview option so you’ll know if you did something wrong.

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 week’s episode with only two men and no booze, comes with much news, such as that of Microsoft losing interest in its hot fling, Yahoo. Expensive and yet totally desirable tech from Lenovo, HTC and Apple shows up on our desks and we cannot help but drool all over our keyboards. We are also in awe of Robots and Local researchers that bring us good tidings. Tis a great time to be alive, and geeking out before we die of too much American junk food.

We Love YOU GTAIV,
Niko Bellic and Roman Bellic.

Stories this Week :

Microsoft Withdraws Its Bid for Yahoo – New York Times

Final specifications for Lenovo’s IdeaPad U110 revealed – Engadget

HTC Touch Diamond – Engadget

10 More Countries to get the iPhone – Gizmodo

Creative could pay class-action settlement over exaggerated MP3 capacities – Engadget

Singapore researchers removed the last obstacle on the OLED way | TheTopBlog

Bentley Unveils Electric Greenpower

Byte of The Week : LogMeIn

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