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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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links for 2008-04-10
Posted in Daily Links
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Mp3 Tagging Best Practices
The phrase “best practices” gets thrown around a lot in IT (Information Technology). You have best practices for programming, server configuration, SOA, and even software installation. There are best practices for other things like cooking, organizing, and cleaning. So today we are going to take a look at some of the best practices that I use when tagging and organizing my digital music. Some of these go against other “best practices” for tagging that you might find on the internet, but everyone has their preferences and you are not stuck to listening to just me.
Album Artist & Artist Tags
This is a topic that gets confusing to some people, but I wrote a nice article on this a while back that I feel really covers the basis for the differences between the “Album Artist” and “Artist” tags in a mp3 file. Essentially, the artist tag is for the artist of that particular song while the “Album Artist” tag is for the overall album artist. This works really great on multiple artists compilations. Make sure you understand the difference between these two tags and how to utilize them correctly. The article referenced is: Artists Versus Album Artist.
Follow Proper Title Casing
For some people this is not a big deal, personally though I hate with “A” and “The” are capitalized incorrectly in the titles. Drives me bonkers, this is probably why my wife calls me “anal” but who knows.
Proper title casing means the first letter of the first and last word are capitalized. All other words with a character count of 4 or more are capitalized as well. Exceptions include pronouns. Examples:
- Incorrect: “Shoot Me In The Smile”
- Right: “Shoot Me in the Smile”
Disc & Track Numbers
Some people will tell you to only use the Disc Number tag when the album has more than one disc. I disagree with this approach. Mainly because if you’re going to do it for some, why would you not do it for others. It just doesn’t make sense.
Also, make sure you fill in both parts of the numbers so an album that has 3 discs will be “1/3”, “2/3” and “3/3” and likewise for track numbering as well “1/1″, 2/10”, and so on. This makes it really easy to get an idea of how tracks and albums connect together when you are looking at them in a spreadsheet or in your music organization application.
The exception to this rule are miscellaneous tracks, things like 1 off tracks that you may have downloaded or what not. You can strip these tracks of their track and disc numbers since they do not associate with an album.
Album Art
Everyone likes album art. Album art really makes iTunes shine in coverflow mode. However album art that has dimensions of less than 500 pixels detracts in a big way. If you can not find the album art online and you own the album, scan your copy in. You will be much happier with a minimum of 500×500 image that you made yourself than some 250×186 copy you find off of Google Images.
Some people get crazy and want to add images for the CD, the internal art, and rear artwork. This is entirely up to you. There are ID3 tag designations for each of these artwork types, so if you want to be completely archival, then go nuts.
Genres
I don’t feel that one should get overly specific with their genres, but getting kind of specific can help you when creating playlists (especially smart playlists in iTunes). For example, I have Christian Rock and Christian Hard Rock genres in my collection because I want that level of granularity when making playlists. However, the genres are not so overly specific that it’s overkill, especially since I have a lot of music under both genres.
Your Best Practices
Do you have any best practices that you follow when you organize your digital music? If so, leave a comment or two. I’d love to see how other people handle different things with their music collections.
Death of Print News, I Don’t Think So
A couple of weeks ago I was listing to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, and there was a lively discussion about the direction of print media. The question on the table was will print media die?
This is a very interesting question because for years now online, new media writers have been claiming that the newspaper and magazine are dead. Every few months you will find a lot of bloggers making this claim and announcing that print media folks should get with the program. However, I feel that the death of print media is a long way off, if it will ever happen at all.
One thing that people seem to forget is that a lot of people don’t like reading things on a screen. They like the tactile feeling of something in their hand. That black print on white(ish) paper means something to them. Think about this. Comic books are available for free in digital files (if you’re willing to look for them and are okay with the lack legal associated with them) but many comic book geeks need to have that book in their hand. Newspapers and magazines are the same way. I really enjoy sitting in bed reading my magazines before bed. Always have, and it really helps me sleep.
Another reason that print media will just never completely go away is because if there is some form of electricity outage, newspapers can still deliver the news. Printing presses today require electricity but several news papers still have old crank presses somewhere, mostly for archival, historical purposes but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t break them out and start printing if they needed to.
People read newspapers at restaurants, they read them on the bus on the way to work, and they read them in the morning as they drink their coffee. It’s just something people do and have done for a darn good while. Some people do it because that’s what their parents did and so that tradition will carry down. The need for tactile print still means something in this world and some people just won’t believe something until they see it printed in that black print. That’s just the way it is.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
Death of Print News, I Don't Think So
A couple of weeks ago I was listing to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, and there was a lively discussion about the direction of print media. The question on the table was will print media die?
This is a very interesting question because for years now online, new media writers have been claiming that the newspaper and magazine are dead. Every few months you will find a lot of bloggers making this claim and announcing that print media folks should get with the program. However, I feel that the death of print media is a long way off, if it will ever happen at all.
One thing that people seem to forget is that a lot of people don’t like reading things on a screen. They like the tactile feeling of something in their hand. That black print on white(ish) paper means something to them. Think about this. Comic books are available for free in digital files (if you’re willing to look for them and are okay with the lack legal associated with them) but many comic book geeks need to have that book in their hand. Newspapers and magazines are the same way. I really enjoy sitting in bed reading my magazines before bed. Always have, and it really helps me sleep.
Another reason that print media will just never completely go away is because if there is some form of electricity outage, newspapers can still deliver the news. Printing presses today require electricity but several news papers still have old crank presses somewhere, mostly for archival, historical purposes but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t break them out and start printing if they needed to.
People read newspapers at restaurants, they read them on the bus on the way to work, and they read them in the morning as they drink their coffee. It’s just something people do and have done for a darn good while. Some people do it because that’s what their parents did and so that tradition will carry down. The need for tactile print still means something in this world and some people just won’t believe something until they see it printed in that black print. That’s just the way it is.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
links for 2008-04-05
Posted in Daily Links
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Michael Koby 
Facebook Applications: The Blessing & the Curse
It seems that Facebook applications are becoming the bane of a Facebook user’s existence. At least on Facebook anyway. Since Facebook announced their API hundreds of applications have been developed for the Facebook platform and several hundred are used on peoples profiles daily.
There is an application for everything. You can find out “What Your Love Language Is” or you can join the new generation of Oregon Trail. If neither of those suit you, you can “Super Poke” your friends or even have Twitter update your status. Want to play Scrabble, they even have you covered there. Point is, there are a lot of Facebook applications.
For every person that installs a ton of Facebook applications, there are those that find the idea of a bunch of applications messing up their profile to be horrendous at best. There are people who complain regularly about the many applications that dominate Facebook profiles. It really is an “either/or” kind of game out there with regards to Facebook Applications.
So what is it exactly about these applications that have some Facebook users up in arms? It could be one of two issues depending on who you ask. The less vocal bunch are those that do not like looking at profiles that have a ton of applications on them. They find these applications distracting from the social aspect of Facebook. Most of the folks in this lot tend to just deal with it and move on. The other group however make blog posts, posts on the “Wall” of their Facebook friends, and are extremely vocal about their hatred for Facebook applications. Why? Because a lot of these applications require you to “invite” friends to join in and install the application. In several cases you can’t see certain things unless you are also using the specified application. Sure, Facebook is a social website and some aspects of it can not be enjoyed unless you have friends participating, but should applications require you to invite others in order to install the application?
Basically Facebook applications are new kind of spam in their own right. I myself have received countless “invites” to certain applications with a note attached from the user inviting me that says something like “You can ignore, I had to invite all my friends to move to the next level” or something similar. Annoying? You bet. I however, do not have a ton of friends and so I don’t see this as much as those that have thousands of “friends” (can you really have thousands of “friends”?).
However there is reverse side to this issue. The fact that the development API that allows programmers to create these applications exists is something of an achievement. It is something that gave Facebook a nice edge over MySpace (until MySpace joined OpenSocial). The ability to develop on a social network allowed for some new kinds of applications and nifty innovation. So while it has created the new “social network spam” it has created a network of applications that run on a social platform. And not all applications are spammy. Some of them even make sense (like the BlackBerry PIN Exchnage app).
I think that if we can move away from having to invite our friends when we install and use applications it won’t be so bad and people will be less angry over the issue. It is going to take time however because most people view the idea of a social application having to be overly social. We need control over how much social we want in our applications.