September 16

corn on the cob

I noticed that the iPod software refused to copy any song that didn't have a valid ID3 tag. Unfortunately for me there is a lot of my music missing such tags. Back in the Napster days I downloaded tons of stuff that wasn't tagged and about 3 years ago, I ripped my CD collection but forgot to set the tags correctly. So, most likely I will re-rip my collection after I am done with my current ripping project and then find the remaining untagged files and fix them somehow.

I decided I needed a way to crawl my mp3 directory and find any files that are not tagged, saving the names of the untagged mp3's to a file. I wrote a little C program to do this and from this experience learnt a couple of things, firstly, C is really really fast, it took less than 2 minutes to scan 90GB's of music, opening each and every file, and checking for a string that might appear within the first three bytes of each file. The second thing I learnt was that I have lots and lots of untagged music, mostly, the stuff I got from Napster. I know of several programs that do batch tagging, easytag isn't too bad and Exfalso, part of the Quodlibet program. I guess I will have to sit down one evening and try to do some tag voodoo to make my collection iPod compliant but I do wish my iPod would STHU about tags and just play the song.

Corn season in Ontario is in full swing and although my family like to barbecue corn in the husk, my favorite is to simply boil it, I find it is more tender and far more juicy this way. One trick to getting extra Delicious corn on the cob is to not salt the water, but instead add a little sugar and some lemon juice. Try it!

Posted by æc♥ | Permanent Link