kellyfelkins.org: entertainment

hëävy mëtäl ümläüt

Wikipedia has a very funny article on the heavy metal ümlaut.

And if you find this entertaining, you better sit down before viewing TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME.

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the lighter side: japanese error messages

[My friend posted these on our twiki at work and I just had to share. I can’t credit the original author.]

Here are 14 actual error messages seen on the computer screens in Japan, where some are written in Haiku. Aren’t these better than “your computer has performed an illegal operation”?

The Web site you seek cannot be located, but countless more exist.
Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.
Program aborting: Close all that you have worked on. You ask far too much.
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams.
Yesterday it worked. Today it is not working. Windows is like that.
Your file was so big. It might be very useful. But now it is gone.
Stay the patient course. Of little worth is your ire. The network is down.
A crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone.
Three things are certain: Death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has occurred?
You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here.
Out of memory. We wish to hold the whole sky, but we never will.
Having been erased, the document you’re seeking must now be retyped.
Serious error. All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

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installing atronscrobbler on windows using cygwin

I recently released atronscrobbler, a system that updates audioscrobbler with your audiotron play activity.

atronscrobbler is written in perl and needs to run on a unix-like system—both of which may be a problem for people running windows. Fortunately there is a free unix like system for windows, called cygwin.

Here are step-by-step instructions for installing cygwin, perl, and atronscrobbler. Good luck with these instructions and let me know if I can improve them in anyway. If you have suggestions that you want to share with everyone, just add a comment to this article. Or you can drop me an email.

installing cygwin with needed development packages and perl

create the c:\cygwin-setup folder
save setup.exe (found here) in the c:\cygwin-setup folder. If you are using the firefox browser, setup.exe will be saved on your desktop. Move it to c:\cygwin-setup
double-click on setup.exe in c:\cygwin-setup
On the Choose Installation Type screen in Cygwin Setup, choose “install from internet” (the default).
On the Choose Installation Directory screen in Cygwin Setup, use “c:\cygwin” (the default).
On the Select Local Package Directory screen in Cygwin Setup, use “c:\cygwin-setup” (the default).
On the Select Connection Type screen in Cygwin Setup, select the appropriate connection type—I always use “direct connection”.
On the Choose A Download Site screen in Cygwin Setup, ah, choose a download site. I’ve used various download sites, most recently ‘ftp://planetmirror.com’. I try to find one that is close to me, but that is not easy to figure out.
We are going to install 3 packages from the Select Packages screen in Cygwin Setup.
- Click on the plus sign next to Devel in the Category column. Scroll down the list and find the package named “gcc-core: C compiler”. Click on Skip, changing it to some version number. This means to install this package.
- Scroll down the list and find the package named “make: The GNU version of the ‘make’ utility”. Click on Skip, changing it to some version number.
- Now click on the plus sign next to Interpreters in the Category column. Scroll down the list and find the package named “perl: Larry Wall’s Practical Extracting and Report Language”. Click on Skip, changing it to some version number. This means to install this package.
Click ‘next’. setup will download and install the selected packages. This may take a while – be patient and enjoy the show.
On the Create Icons screen in Cygwin Setup, choose your favorite way to start a program—by double clicking on a desktop icon or by selecting from the start menu—or both. Click ‘finished’.

Welcome to the cygwin world.

You now have cygwin installed, with perl. That’s a big step. Take a breather. I always look for words of confirmation from loved ones with statements like ‘Honey. Guess what? I just installed cygwin.’

installing perl modules

Atronscrobbler needs an optional perl module, called LWP::UserAgent. Perl has a system for module management, which, in theory, makes it easy to install and update perl modules.
It actually does make it easy, but not as easy as you make like.

Start the cygwin console by either double clicking on the desktop icon or selecting cygwin console from the start menu. A console window should open. It may print some messages and then leave you at the $ prompt.
At the $ prompt, type perl -MCPAN -e shell. Please note the capitalization. This opens a perl shell and runs the CPAN module, which is perl’s system for installing optional modules.
At the Are you ready for manual configuration? question, enter no.
At the cpan> prompt, type install LWP::UserAgent.
It will ask if you want to install some sample programs. I said no to all 4 of these.
It finds some prerequisites and asks if you want to “prepend them to the queue?”. Say yes each time.
A bunch of messages are printed as CPAN downloads, installs, and tests each module. You should end up back at the cpan> prompt.
Type exit. This will end the CPAN program and bring you back to the $ prompt.

Welcome to the perl world.

You now have cygwin installed, with perl, including the LWP::UserAgent package. Cool.

installing atronscrobbler

Now, note your cygwin home directory by typing ‘pwd’ at the $ prompt. It could be /home/[your user name] or /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/[your user name]. Translate these into their window equivalent folders—”/home/[your user name]” is c:\cygwin\home\[your user name] and ”/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/[your user name]” is c:\Documents and Settings\[your user name].
download atronscrobbler.tar.gz and place it in your cygwin home directory folder. Note that your web browser may put it somewhere else, such as your desktop. If so, you need to move it to the appropriate folder.
Look for atronscrobbler.tar.gz in your cygwin home directory by typing ‘ls’ at the $ prompt. You should see it listed there.
Unpack it by typing tar xvzf atronscrobbler.tar.gz.
Copy the ”.atronscrobbler” file to your home directory by typeing
```
cp atronscobbler-v.1/.atronscrobbler .
```
Edit ”.atronscrobbler”, making appropriate changes.

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audiotron to audioscrobbler: atronscrobbler

Think of it as an Audioscrobbler “plugin” for your Audiotron.

Update: audioscrobbler is now on github

If you don’t know about www.audioscrobbler.com, please check it out. Audioscrobbler is a site that can help you find new music through a community web site which displays participants music preferences which are automatically collected by plugins in your favorite audio player.

Audiotrons were one of the first network aware digital music players and have a devoted user base.

Now audiotron users can report their music playing activities to audioscrobbler.

Atronscrobbler is a perl script that runs on a nearby machine, polls an audiotron for play activity, and reports that play activity to the audioscrobbler servers.

To use atronscrobbler, simply save the archive to your system, gunzip and untar it, create a config file, and run it. There are a few more details in the README.

If you do not have perl installed, fear not. Perl runs on most everything under the sun. Installing and configuring perl for this application is quite doable on windows systems.

Get It

Atronscrobbler is now hosted on github

Download

Install It

README

But I’ve Never Used Perl on My Windows System!

Please check out my step by step instructions.

Enjoy!

Bugs

5-apr-05 atronscrobbler exits if it can’t find its audiotron. Unfortunately, this is all too often. I’ll change it to just report that it can’t find the audiotron and check back later.

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lessons learned in electronic media

Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

It seemed simple at first. Mp3 rippers were everywhere. Just slide the CD into the computer and, voila, mp3s!

oh, there are bitrates?

oh, some rippers rip better than others?

oh, I need to deal with these tags?

Cool, here’s a ripper that will get the tag information from someplace …out there.

oh, these tags that came from out there are wrong?

So I’ve done a lot of learning on this. These are just some of the issues. I’m not going to go into building and configuring the home network or how to effectively back up an ever changing 30GB plus collection. And, yes, I did loose it once before it was backed up.

My current process goes like this:

Rip the CD with a quality ripper and compressor. I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and LAME. EAC is an audio grabber that copies the bits from the CD onto your disk somewhere. It will optionally run the compressor of your choice on those bits creating the mp3 files. LAME is a quaility open source compressor. EAC will grab the music information from freedb.org which is used to name the mp3s and populate the id3 tags. Unfortunately, freedb only gets you close to where you need to go with naming and tagging.
Retag and rename the mp3s using the MusicBrainz tagger. MusicBrainz keeps their own database of music information which is much more carefully managed than freedb. Plus, MusicBrainz records signatures of music tracks, so it is possible to identify music by this signature rather than just by the (possibly wrong) mp3 file names or id3 tags.

Here are some other details to help you get it right the first time:

Due to reasons I don’t fully understand, the LAME project does not offer precompiled versions of LAME. However, others do. I get my copies here.
EAC needs settings for LAME. I use the “recommended” settings, which work great.
You can define how EAC will name your files. I use %D[backslash]%C[backslash]%N-%T. In english this means “create an artist sub folder, in that create an album sub folder, in that name each track with the track number, a dash, and the track title.” It’s actually more important to do this in MusicBrainz—see below.
I use 2 folders for my mp3s—a main folder (say, “My Music”) and another folder called something like “musicbrainzed”. My musicbrainzed folder is in My Music. This allows me to point an mp3 player at My Music and load up all of my music. It allows me to keep separate my first try tagged files from my properly tagged files.

Using MusicBrainz

The current MusicBrainz application is a little tricky to use but I understand there is a new version in development which will address the issues I discuss here.

MusicBrainz attempts to recognize each of the tunes in the directory you give it individually. I recommend you give MusicBrainz a single CD to tag. It will look them up in its database and tell you that some were recognized and some were not. I recommend that you check both. In fact, I’ve gotten in the habit of overriding its list of recognized tracks. Here’s how I do it:

Click on the Identified tab and view the information associated with identified tracks. Often there will be one or a few artists associated with various identified tracks. Memorize the one you think is correct. Pay attention to artist and album details.
Select all of the tracks in the Identified tab and click the Misidentified button. In other words, tell it you don’t trust any of its identifications.
Click on the Unidentified tab. Select a track and click “Lookup”. This will bring up a list of artists and tracks on albums.
Click on the artists name.
Click on the album name. Now you have a list of the tracks for that album. Now it is easy to assign the track names to the track files. You simply look at the highlighted track, and click the little tag icon next to the appropriate track below. Do this for each track.
Now you click the save icon on the toolbar (looks like a floppy disk with an arrow). My MusicBrainz is configured to move the files to the “My Music/musicbrainzed” folder.
Close MusicBrainz. You are done.

To configure MusicBrainz to move files to the proper directories with the proper names, view “options” and click on the “naming” tab. Check the “Rename files when writing metadata tags” box. I use this as my naming specification:

%artist[backslash]%album[backslash]%0num-%track.

I use this for my Various Artist naming specification:

Various Artists[backslash]%album[backslash]%0num-%artist-%track

Have fun.

-Kelly

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