Blogs

I’ve moved my blog over to http://ambiguiti.es from now on. Over there I’ll be talking about web and mobile development, and maintain a more general blog relating to events, conferences, job postings, and other such news in the industry.

Lovin’ it!

The people at NetLifeResearch have put together a funny little ‘Bad Usability Calendar’ which is an interesting look at some bad habits in interaction design. I’ve reposted it here (bad_usability_calendar_08_us_english.pdf) for download but you can also get it off their site here (http://www.badusability.com/).

Some highlights:

• Only add personalization where it adds value
• Dont require login where it isn’t needed
• Bigger is better (at least easier to click)

I recently decided I wanted to be able to play music from my MP3 library in my livingroom. Simple right? Well not if you are a technophile and gadgetophile like myself.

I ended up with an AppleTV (which I still haven’t unboxed) and a small media server for my music. My first problem was that my music library is totally disorganized with improperly tagged music, duplicates, and other junk riddled througout. I took it upon myself to fix this. Here’s what my research turned up.

Original Library size: 93GB

First step: Import it into iTunes and let iTunes organize your library. This will convert all your silly WMA’s and whatnot into M4a’s, get rid of the corrupted files and other junk that somehow crept into those directories over time. It will also do some filtering for files with wacky filenames (which probably arent valuable music anyway). This got rid of about 10GB of junk.
Next: Get yourself a free copy of Picard by MusicBrainz. This will do 3 things for you:

• Picard will scan your library and identify all of the known music files based on Amazon.com data (and their own database as I understand it). Tell it to rewrite your ID3 tags and blow away the old ones. It’s quite accurate. Then tell it to rename all the files and organize it into a new folder (not your iTunes folder). It will normalize all the artist names (so “feist” and “_feist” and “feiST” all become “Feist”, etc) and fix the track names and so-on.
• This will leave about 30% of your music yet-unidentified and untagged. Run the ’scan’ feature of picard on these remaining titles. This will take a digital ‘fingerprint’ (called a PUID) of the MP3 and try to identify it based on the online database. My experience was that this is VERY accurate.. really cool. Budget a full day and night for this process if you have a lot of music. It’s totally automated so you don’t need to be in front of your machine.
• This will leave you with about 15% of your music unidentified. You can then run the ‘Cluster’ feature of Picard on these titles. Picard will try to group your mp3’s into artist and album groups based on their tags and titles. I only kept a small number of these because I dont really want music that isnt properly tagged. I mostly kept the obscure ones that were tagged but didnt show up on Amazon.com.

The remainder of music I then deleted. zap!

Now you will want to get yourself a tool to help remove duplicate music (of which I had a LOT.. evidently from Limewire downloads and whatnot). I forked out $20Â for a program called Abee MP3 Duplicate Finder. This is overall a good program but VERY buggy (maybe it was just in Vista that it was buggy). Eventually I got Abee to identify tracks that were similar based on title, tags, and song length (really clever). Then it recommends which ones to delete and keep based on bitrate and song length (also clever). I looked at other programs for this part of the process but liked Abbe the best.. again.. beware. Some of the bugs I encountered were:

• The 2nd time I ran Abee it double-counted all my music. Had I gone ahead with the delete, it would have erased ALL my music. If this happens. Uninstall Abee completely, delete the folder from Program Files, reboot, and reinstall.
• Some songs it couldn’t delete for some reason.. Just press OK when this happens.. I dont know why it does this.
• Occasionally it threw more serious errors. This only seemed to happen when I was running other programs at the same time (like Firefox or Explorer). Don’t do this. If it happens. Uninstall, delete, reboot, reinstall as before.

Final Step: Clear your iTunes library and re-import all your music.

Once that was all done I had successfully trimmed my library down to 1 copy of each track and properly named, labelled, and tagged music. I let iTunes run all night and it got all the volume levels and downloaded album art.

The Final De-crufted Library size: 43GBÂ

Anyway, that was my experience. Thought some of you might at least find it interesting. Would be interested to hear what other people have done.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2007/07/chinese-iphone-.html

This speaks for itself.. my reaction: holy cow that was fast.

It’s pronounced TWiTTER, not TWEETER.. which you said twice in a row.. like an idiot.

Wait.. IS there a tweeter? I wouldn’t be surprised. If so, disregard.