Tracking my mp3 blog downloads
NateMarvelle
downloading interesting stuff as I go, but often by the time I get them
into iTunes, I've forgetten who, what, where, etc. Some of the songs
have little to no identifying information or I just want to remember
what site i got it off of. Some of the blogs are impossible to search,
etc.
So I want a good approach to leaving myself quick little notes
capturing information from the site about the songs I download as I
move through 10-20 blogs.
Any thoughts?
Jonathan Greene
That's a tough one given the speed in which you are probably moving.
I appreciate your missing as I've been using iPodder a great deal
lately ... too many sources for MP3 files (not the actual podcasts or
shows) don't include any source info. Sometimes they don't even
utilize the ID3 tag at all which makes figuring it all out close to
impossible.
Jonathan Greene
has a nice one that takes what you have selected on a page and creates
a new blog post with it including attribution. You might use
something like that but change it for an app of your choosing to
enable tracking. Perhaps even del.icio.us would work for
you...there's a bookmarklet there as well.
bryce benton
is that one of its principal features is tagging mp3 files. Might not
be too effective with new, obscure releases, though.
I could be totally offbase here. Not sure.
--bryce
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 01:37:22 -0400, Jonathan Greene
yesno
site. I *only* use id3 tags to track music. The filename is
meaningless to me.
What we need is a wget-alike that can talk to iTunes, so you don't
download music you already have. You can set wget to not download
music already present where it puts its files, but I keep my music
organized by iTunes and on an external HD, so there needs to be some
intelligence in the software.
The problem with all of this is that it violates the spirit of MP3
blogs. They may as well just post names of tracks that we then go
and get from Gnutella. They go through all the trouble to select and
write about special tracks and we just try to leech. On the other
hand, I want to learn about music after I know I like it, not before,
and elegant contextualizations of music I've never heard are
meaningless. Just give me the songs, and if I care, I'll read about
them.
How does this relate to GTD and productivity, again? I would love a
life hack that made it so that my taste in pop music doesn't fossilize,
I guess.
keith....@gmail.com
yesno wrote:
> If a site doesn't use id3 tags properly, I stop downloading from that
> site. I *only* use id3 tags to track music. The filename is
> meaningless to me.
> The problem with all of this is that it violates the spirit of MP3
> blogs. They may as well just post names of tracks that we then
go
> and get from Gnutella. They go through all the trouble to select and
> write about special tracks and we just try to leech.
You just hit the nail on the head about why we MP3Bloggers hate the
various hacks people have come up with to scrape our sites and such.
That said, In the end, I don't really have that much of a problem with
the sort of folks who are reading this using wget. You guys are the
ones who are going to find a way no matter what. The reason I started
obfuscating the filenames (using tinyurl) was mainly in an attempt to
stop the folks who just followed tutorials like Jeff Veens blindly, by
rote, withoug understanding it. The idea being, that those folks were
the largest scale leeches, and the biggest threat. The reason I stopped
was because BlogMeThree (http://www.rowlff.de/blogmethree/) basically
singled out my blog and set things up to download my mp3's all over.
To get back to the question at hand though, about how to keep track of
where things come from - Well, I keep an MP3 Backlog folder on my
desktop with a series of subfolders. One for each MP3 Blog I read
regularly, one for miscellaneous other Mp3 blogs (and new ones. those
files are generally flagged individually by where they came from), one
for reader submissions, one for label submissions, and one for
downloads I've sought out myself. The folder can get pretty crowded
sometimes, but I just wait for an empty Sunday afternoon and just blast
through it.
Or, if I'm expecting a particularly hairy commute, I'll import them all
to Itunes at once, put them all into a playlist. And Ipod away.
Now that I think about it also - for those of you not using WGet - it
might be worthwhile to just really quickly edit the id3 tags on all of
your MP3 Blogs with a comment about where the song came from - then
set up smart playlists for each blogs stuff... I might just do that
myself starting today.
--TTIKTDA Keith.
Christopher
you can't do much better than MP3Freaker
(http://www.lairware.com/mpfreaker/) for OS X or MusicMatch Jukebox
(http://www.musicmatch.com) if you're using Win32.
Sidenote: MusicMatch Jukebox has the best overall MP3 tag-editing
capabilities I've ever used.
yesno
Applescripts for iTunes) usually does the trick. The former is free
and uses fingerprinting, the latter can transform regular filenames
into id3 tags.