Tag: Music

Quick Tagging and Renaming

Last week I recovered a friend’s mp3 library from a 2nd generation iPod. All was well except for that fact that any music put onto the iPod is given a random file name such as C00XY.mp3. Not helpful.

After scratching my head and thinking that we would have to rename most of the files manually, I started to look for re-tagging programs. A few were recommended on the internet but I found them to be too unwieldy or didn’t quite work right.

Thankfully, I discovered a lightweight tagging application called Ex Falso. A fairly simple to use tool which easily re-tags your music, or renames the files with much more ease than any others that I have come across. It only took a few minutes to read the tags of around 3500 songs and rename them all.

To install in Ubuntu, simply run the command:

<code>sudo apt-get install exfalso</code>

As an added bonus – it also fixed tags of .m4a audio files, meaning that preparing music to go on my iPod Touch in Linux is slightly easier. Wehey!

Now We Can Make Our Own Gigs

I’ve just been reading John Young’s post on his forum about paying for gigs where you live:John Young Message Board – New ways…...

It strikes me as an odd idea where you pledge an amount of money and once there’s enough money pledged, then it’s likely a gig will be arranged.

I suppose this explains it better (but it still leaves me a little confused):

How does it work ?? Well it’s easy some folks will sponsor shows i.e. $500 or £200 etc etc and some will just pay for a ticket or two and some who are curious will just turn up for free… it’s just a way to get heard and a way to make things happen.
Of course if you buy a share of the concert you can sell parts of that share to friends and we can also try and help you move those ‘tickets’ so it doesn’t cost you too much…and of course no money changes hands until the night of the show.
This is starting to get exciting although it will take time to grow…it means there will be an appreciative audience at the gig and that concerts will happen

So there you have it. It will be interesting to see how this comes together, and if it can make a good model for live music and smaller bands and artists.

Using Rhythmbox as a Media Renderer

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron over the weekend. The process was relatively painless, and some of the upgrades made little, but nice, improvements.

Finally, the UPNP media rendering functionality in Rhythmbox is working!

To set this up, you need to access the command line, and install the pyhton-coherence package:

<code>sudo apt-get install python-coherence</code>

Once installed, fire up Rhythmbox, and click on Edit > Plugins.

Once there, tick the box for DLNA/UPnP to enable UPnP.

Rhythmbox Plugins Menu

Click Close and you should see a new shared tab on the left, which will list your network UPnP servers.

It’s somewhat limited in that it doesn’t present you with the various folder views that other media renderers will – but at least you can pick out music from network devices.

Rhythmbox Shared Tab

Cool.

Mario Paints Music

It seems that this is old news generally, but I found Mario Paint Composer on the Internet yesterday. It was actually due to a YouTube video (why the hell I ended up looking at a Rick Astley song I still don’t know).

Of course, there is not one but two composer programs emulating the features of Mario Paint. The other is Mario Sequencer, which was originally written in Japanese. Luckily the website hosts an English version.

I’ve found that sequencer seems to have better timing, but Composer has a slightly nicer interface.

I was musing on being able to use this in schools as a basic synthesizer for primary kids. It has everything they need, such as tempo and different sounds. Most importantly, the sounds are fun and absurd.

I’m currently working on my Mario Paint version of ‘Faithealer’…

Extract Audio from DVDs in Ubuntu

I wanted to extract Marillion’s cover of Toxic today, which lives on the DVD release of Thankyou Whoever You Are / Most Toys.

I found a useful page over at Ubuntu Geek which covered the topic nicely using a tool called transcode, which I’ve used a little of in the past.

I was having some difficulties with this one though, as transcode only worked on a few titles on the DVD. After a bit of testing, I discovered that this wasn’t woking on titles that had no video.

Eventually I settled on this command line to extract the song:

<code>transcode -i /dev/dvd -x null,dvd -T 4,1,1 -a 0 -y null,ogg -o MarillionToxic.ogg</code>

Here’s the breakdown:
transcode – run transcode
-i /dev/dvd – set the input to the DVD drive
-x null,dvd – set the input modules. As I don’t want video, I’ve used null and then dvd for the audio channel
-T 4,1,1 – set the Title 4, Chapter 1, Angle 1, which is the Toxic track on the DVD
-a 0 – set the audio track (the first is 0 on DVDs)
-y null,ogg – sets the output to ogg. Once again, I’ve forced null for the video
-o MarillionToxic.ogg – finally, I’ve set the filename for extracting the audio.

The whole track was extracted from DVD in a matter of seconds. Brilliant.