MrBalky Heavy Industries » tips

Album art, iTunes and MP3 tags

mrbalky — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:24:39 +0000

iTunes album art is a disaster. In fact, I keep thinking I’ll write about how bad iTunes sucks in general, but for now, let’s stick with album art. Long story short, the best thing you can do to make album art work on an iPod, is to embed it directly in the MP3 tag.

Well, I’m pushing 10,000 tracks, and I have them backed up, over a network, using an application that diffs them by hashing the content. Essentially this means that if I change the tag, I will have to back all the files over again, but the application will first generate new hash values for all of the files. It’ll take hours and hours.

Furthermore, this will expand the size of every file by the size of the album art. Not so bad if it’s a 15K jpg, but if it’s a high quality image, it could add up to GB.

But I finally succumbed. Still, though iTunes gives a way to embed album art, it’s not automated, and doing this manually for the hundreds of individual albums I have, well, that’s not pretty either.

Googling around I stumbled on this post on Brent Evans Geek Tonic that runs through how to automate with the application Mp3tag.

While these are clear instructions, I’m not much of a keyboard shortcut guy with applications I rarely use. Mp3tag’s menus are pretty convoluted; it took forever to find the way to get it to give you the tagging option in a menu.

Add your library directory and select a track as described in the linked blog post
Select “Convert” -> “Actions” from the menu bar. This brings up the Action Groups dialog:
Click the “new” button on the right. Name it something like “embed album art”:
Now you should see the “Actions” dialog:
Click the “new” button on the right, and select “Import cover from file”:
You will need to give the name of the artwork file that resides in each album directory. Mine is “folder.jpg”:
Close all the dialogs. Now you should see your new “Action group” under the Actions toolbar button:
Select your tracks and go

Geez. After all that, maybe the undocumented keyboard shortcut is the way to go…

Custom iPod Touch icon

mrbalky — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:44:26 +0000

Thanks to a post over at Laughing Squid, bookmark MrBalky on your iPod Touch (or the less cool iPhone) and revel in the awesomeness:

Of course, everyone is doing it.

Whew.

mrbalky — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:14:15 +0000

Why yes, I do hate the Snap preview. Here’s a solution for crusty late adopters like me:
http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/01/unsnap_your_hyperlinks.html

Add lijit personal search to WordPress

mrbalky — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:03:05 +0000

Here’s how I did it, anyway:

Go to your lijit page (mine is http://www.lijit.com/users/MrBalky)
Click “Customize your search” to enter your Google account info
Back on your lijit page, click “Get this wijit” in the search box
Copy the javascript wijit code.
Head to your WordPress admin pages -> Presentation -> Theme Editor.
Click “searchform.php” on the lower-right.
Add the wijit code. (Since there’s nothing to search on this blog, I just removed the existing search code.)
Click “update file>>”, and you’re done.

It’s a snap.