Tuesday, January 29, 2008

mp3splt

This is a real cool, nifty thing i came across yesterday. What happened was, yesterday was copying some of my muzak frm my dvd coll to HD, when i came across Johnny Cash's 'Man in Black' album and me thinks why not give it a spin, its been a long time. So i do just that, but then i see, the file is an album wrap! Now ppl will know tht its a Pain! First thing there's no easy way of jumping tracks and then couple tht with scrobbling screwups!
'M probably a bit like Monica(frm F.R.I.E.N.D.S,if you didn't get it) when it comes to ID3 tags. My fingers start itching, whenever i see a badly tagged mp3. I can't understand how some(probably most?) ppl don't seem to be bothered with badly tagged files! Correcting 'em will hardly take few minutes!
But 'm digressing here, this post is abt mp3splt. So yes, after coming across that, i started googling for some mp3 splitter. I remembered using one on windows ages back. Anyways landed up at this page. And was I in for a pleasant surprise! It fitted my requirement to a T!

-w "wrap mode" - used to split file created with mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap. This should have worked out perfectly for me but that would have been too perfect wouldn't it? It threw up some error saying the file is corrupt, /me guesses it might have been something to do with changing IDv3 tags.

Anyways later on i messed around for a lot of time with
-c "CDDB mode" - and man this would've been such an amazing feature, if only one can find proper CDDB files! And I realized what an hell CDDB file format is! Infact the first result in google tells that, type "CDDB file format" in google and check out the first result! If google doesn't revise/update its algorithm/page ranks, then you will land up here. :)

Finally i ended up using
-s "silent mode" option, which worked out pretty well.

Note: its 'mp3splt' and not 'mp3split', i wasted sometime while trying to d/w it, by overlooking this. :(

Adios

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Blogger Label Search

Yesterday was playing around with my mindtrail blog, trying to add a 'notable posts' section. The idea was to add a label to the posts and just put up a link to the label search. Everything went fine but for two issues.

> Somehow when i did a search, not all posts with the label were appearing. Totally weird i know! Seemed to me like blogger had some issue with displaying more number of results. Anyways googled it, seeing if thr is already some known issue. The nice thing abt google is, you needn't have to go thru' the links, the answer is displayed on the search page itself(depends on how good your query is ofcourse ;) ). So without delving deeper tried doing "http://yourblog/search/label/?max-results=100 Is it as simple as that?" and it worked! Now 've no clue how or why it should make any difference.

> Second was, i did not want labels to be shown for each post. But somehow couldn't figure out how to do it. Probably because i still haven't upgraded the template of that blog and most of the probable solutions were related to new template mechanism.

Anyways talking about power of google search, was reminded of a very cool query hack which i use a lot these days. With the cricket season on, all one needs to do is type 'live cricket score' in one's FF google search box, and presto you get the latest score!

No need to go to any specific site and you escape the load times, plus for any onlooker, it just looks like any other google search page. :)