Saturday, October 31, 2009

The King of all Music Apps

Five years ago, I didn’t care a single little bit about music in any way shape
or form.  Now, I have over 4 gibibytes or so of it, and I can’t seem to find an application to manage
it decently.

I recently tried MediaMonkey, but what i thought would auto-update all of my
music, just assigned it to the album of a completely unrelated artist and screwed up a good bit of my
library!  Ughh!

So, I’m still trying to find a Music Management Application that
can do the following:

  • Update MP3 ID3 Tags (with:)
  • Update
    Album Artwork (High Resolution)
  • Update Album and Track names and Artists, Year, Genre
    (basics)
  • Add/Update Lyrics (Unsynchronized & Synchronized if Possible)

  • Move into custom directories the user specifies.

It needs to do
this for both English/Japanese tracks.  iTunes and Windows
Media Player
both do most of these functions fairly well, but their library isn’t nearly big
enough.

If I had an app that could do all that perfectly, and almost automatically, that
would be great.  Pulling the data from wherever it needed to, FreeDB, Gracenote, Amazon, anything
it could possibly get its hands on.

Does anybody know of an app that does all/most of
this, or am I eventually going to have to write my own?

Friday, October 30, 2009

SimpleTwitter Update

I’ve pushed a simple update to the href="http://tech.gtaero.net/2008/02/javascript-simple-twitter-feed.html">SimpleTwitter
JavaScript.  Change log (if its even needed) below.

  • Support for
    Twitter Lists

    • Uses the same format as twitter, for example @ href="http://twitter.com/navarr/shogi">navarr/shogi




  • Support for Turled Profiles

    • style="background-color: #ffffff;">Using the variable &turl=true
      will link @replies to turled beta-profiles instead of
      twitter profiles.

    • Surprisingly,
      this doesn’t break in co-ordination with lists.  It just doesn’t display the list.




  • Uses Search API


    • We moved to the search API for retrieving tweets,
      as well as pulling a JSON file instead of XML.  This MAY BREAK your current
      implementation (though it should not).  If it does, you can use the older script by pulling old.php
      from the server instead of index.php




Yeah,
that’s it.  Was thinking about making the default for &turl being true instead of false, but figured
that’d probably annoy more people than it was worth (at least until I get turled to be of more use as a
twitter replacement).

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

YouTube Mini Audio Player

If you read my personal blog (which a lot of you probably don’t even know
exists) you’ll commonly see music embedded as mini-YouTube embeds.  It turns out, the magic height
is 25 pixels, and the magic width (for play/pause and mute) is 62 pixels.

style="padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px auto; padding-left: 0px; width: 62px; padding-right: 0px; display:
block; float: none; padding-top: 0px"
id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:483cec9e-036b-43a9-b49a-eb9506b37975"
class="wlWriterEditableSmartContent">
name="movie" value="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/4pXfHLUlZf4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"> name="allowFullScreen" value="true"> src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/4pXfHLUlZf4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="62"
height="25">[audio on youtube]

However, it is kind of a burden to do this every time you want to embed a mini player (you have to
edit at four fields in the HTML!)  So to simplify this process, I, like any programmer before me,
created a generator.  Just type in the URL
to the YouTube video and press make, and you’ll get a preview as well as the cross-browser HTML-esque mess
of a code to embed.

Of course, if you’re truly lazy, just
drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmark bar in your web browser, and click it on any YouTube video and
you’ll be taken to the page with the code already generated.

href="javascript:document.location='http://gtaero.net/ytmusic/?q=' + document.location">Generate
Mini-Player

Source code is available via link at the bottom of the
page.

style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-left-width: 0px" title="80x15[1]" border="0" alt="80x15[1]"
src="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/80x151.png" width="80" height="15" />


xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dc:title"
rel="dc:type">class::Scrobbler by rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Navarr T.
Barnier
is licensed under a rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work at xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">gtaero.net.
Permissions beyond the
scope of this license may be available at rel="cc:morePermissions" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">mailto:[email protected].

Old Code – class::Scrobbler

A long time ago I wrote some PHP code for the AudioScrobbler API.  I
wrote it as more of a proof-of-concept and never touched it again, so I don’t know how well it works. 
I may play around with it some more as part of a test just to make sure the thing still works, but I wanted
to share my code with you.

href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/" rel="license"> style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px"
alt="Creative Commons License" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/80x15.png" />



href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">class::Scrobbler
by property="cc:attributionName" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">Navarr T. Barnier is
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
.
Based on a
work at codepad.org.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at href="mailto:[email protected]" rel="cc:morePermissions" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">mailto:[email protected].

Source available at codepad and continued
after the break.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

New Facebook Layout Screenshots (EXCLUSIVE)

So, I got those href="http://tech.gtaero.net/2009/10/facebook-navigational-changes.html" rel="me nofollow">screenshots I
was telling you about yesterday.

href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarr/4022867725/"> src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2504/4022867725_6365ac898e.jpg" />

href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarr/4023626426/"> src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3477/4023626426_ec6fdf3e20.jpg" />

href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarr/4022867955/"> src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2606/4022867955_b1fa11fe33.jpg" />

href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarr/4023626496/"> src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3502/4023626496_cbdb763487.jpg" />

A
picture is worth a thousand words.  As for four, that depends on if each single picture is worth a
thousand words or the algorithm for how much a multitude of pictures together are
worth.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Facebook Navigational Changes

I observed today on the Facebook account of a person close to me, some changes
that had been made to the site that really stood out and grabbed my attention.  Upon review, these
changes are not currently in affect on my own version of the Facebook page, and have not yet been reported
by any of the major Facebook blogs, so I will post some reports on what I saw here.

The
header is a bit bigger, and the notification icon has been moved up to it, possibly the application icon as
well but I did not take a close look.  I think there was also a message icon to display the unread
count of the inbox.

Assuming this wasn’t an error, (or that it was and it isn’t fixed by
tomorrow) I should be able to present you with screenshots.

Otherwise, please be on the
lookout for these changes, and if you notice them yourself, please upload a screenshot to some site and link
to it from here.

I hope to bring you continued coverage of these changes as they unfold.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Boycotting Virgin Mobile USA

So, I’ve started a boycott.  This one’s for real, although I’m unable
to participate in it myself (I can’t afford a new phone.)

Please join me in my efforts to
Boycott Virgin Mobile USA.  The company blocks twitter.  That’s really the only reason. 
They acknowledge that they “do not support it” and they refuse to support it, despite my unlimited plan, so,
I’m calling for a boycott!

Please Tweet this blog and join me in my efforts! 
This is unacceptable =)

Thanks~


Navarr

Friday, October 2, 2009

C++, I learned it

Practically overnight, too.  Of course, that thanks to my knowledge
of Java and PHP, as well as href="http://cplus.about.com/od/learning1/Learn_about_C_and_how_to_write_Programs_in_It.htm">tutorials by
About.com.  Basically, C++ is like this: