Criza guvernamentala
October 14th, 2009
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Posts Tagged ‘Screenshots’
Future GMail
March 18th, 2009
GMail is fast. Faster than you and faster than your computer.
And the one thing that Yahoo Mail will never achieve is the ability to send messages to the future.
How to organize your music: Part 3: Recompressing and converting files
February 25th, 2009
Bitrates
Without going into further details and trying to keep things as simple as possible, a bitrate is the rate (doh!) at which information is extracted and processed (in our case) in a sound file. Since this measurement is done within the time interval of one second, the bitrate basically measures how many bits from the file need to be processed in one second to hear the sound in the file, as a result.
Obviously enough, the more the merrier. That’s because having more information in the same amount of time leads to an increased accuracy of whatever that information is describing (in our case, sound). Of course, you can “describe” sound with less bits and thus, you will “benefit” from a lower sound quality, because less information leads to a not-so-precise sound (distorted instruments, attenuated differences between similar sounds or even missing information). On the other hand, you can convert an audio file from a certain bitrate to a higher one but you will not get any improvement in audio quality because the same amount of information will be stored in the new file, except that it will take up more space without giving nothing in return. You can’t “recreate” information; it’s the one thing that doesn’t transform in the Universe 
.
Bitrates can vary from extremely small ones, unusable in music, to very high ones, like 320 kbps. You can view the bitrates of you files with almost any program but it is easier to view them in mass, so you can quickly decide if dealing with them is something worthy of your time. Media Monkey and iTunes are quite good at this and I’m going to keep reminding about Media Monkey because it makes this task so much easier.
Constant and variable bitrates
When thinking about bitrates most people think, in fact, about constant bitrates.
A constant bitrate means that the same value of the bitrate (per second, as we said) is maintained (constant) thoughout the entire sound file, which gives a quick, simple and liniar dependence between the bitrate and the size of the sound file. You might think that this is the basic way of describing a bitrate and it really is but is not necessarilly the most efficient way. Think about the fact that a certain bitrate allows you to describe a (maximum) amount of information within a fixed number amount of bits. This might cause loss of data due to an insufficient bitrate but it can also represent an overhead if the sound information is not sufficiently complex to require the given bitrate.
The variable bitrate solves this problem somewhere in between, based on the fact that usually, music has sequences of sounds less complex than others, for which a lower bitrate can prove to be enough, thus saving file size. The variable bitrate is, just as the name implies, a method by which an audio file is encoded with different bitrates throughout its length, according to the sound complexity in each section. Since we don’t want to lose any more sound quality, a variable bitrate file would have a maximum allowed bitrate (equivalent to the corresponding constant one, if you wish) which will dynamically decrease and increase again, as needed.
The obvious advantage of the variable bitrate over the constant one is file size. The disadvantage is that variable bit rate requires more processing power to decode and play. Variable bitrates can be recognized by any device (mobile phone, MP3 player) but decoding them will put a higher pressure on the device’s processor. True, an iPod’s processor , for example, can play even H.264 encoded video files (and load them faster than Media Player on Windows, too…) but the decoding work load on the processor reflects in battery life. And battery life might be just as important on a mobile device as the storage space.
Mass converting
You can convert music files with lots of programs. One of the first that allowed you to easily do it was the good old Easy CD-DA Extractor, which I remember using it when I got my very first CD-ROM device, which was back in 97-98 so it has some history. Media Monkey does a great job at this and it can’t get any easier (maybe only faster).
Media Monkey Converter
To convert multiple files in Media Monkey simply select them (be sure to display the bitrate header in the list) and choose Tools > Convert Audio Format, which will display a window much like the one above, where you can choose the codec type, the type of bitrate and the value you desire.
This process can take some time. You might end up spending about 20 seconds on an MP3 so try to select a reasonable number of tracks to convert at a time.
One good thing about Media Monkey is that it can list in the same area all the tracks in a folder and all its subfolders so you won’t have to manually navigate to each folder (simply select [All] in the folder list, on the left).
By default, Media Monkey will not use multiple cores (if you have them of course) for conversion. Also, launching multiple conversion sessions in the same instance of the program will launch multiple decoder processes, which should take advantage of multicore processors, but, unfortunately, decoding take very little processing power compared to encoding so you’ll end up with many small decoder processes and one overloaded process for encoding them all. One alternative is to launch multiple (only as many cores as you have) instances of Media Monkey… but experience shows that when 8 hours of conversion are waiting in the queue ahead, you’ll probably want to keep one free core so you could watch some movies or do your usual work in the meantime .
Why would I want to do that?
I’m not going to start now an endless discussion about bitrates, how low you can go and which maximum bitrate people can hear or are really stubborn about the one they think they hear. If you decide to recompress your music, make some tests, do some listening in a quiet environment and with quality audio hardware and decide for yourself. If you reach the conclusion that this will “hurt” your incredibly sensitive ears, don’t do it and that’s it.
On the other hand, consider at least compressing music for your MP3 player, to extend its battery life. If you use it mostly outdoors, where background noise always exists, you might agree that downgrading from 320 kbps to 128 kbps is quite acceptable.
You can read here a good article about how people sense the differences between different bitrates of the same well-known songs and you can choose to agree or disagree.
Final roundup
Finally, organizing files in their own folders is up to you and how you want your music to be structured like. You can sort it alphabetically, by artist, by album, anyway you want it or you can even leave it the way it is, since now you can import it entirely in a library and quickly navigate using the tags to dynamically sort it the way you want it.
Congratulations if you’ve reached so far reading, thank you and I really hope this was useful!
Bye!
How to organize your music: Part 2: Tagging and renaming files
February 22nd, 2009
We’ll be talking about MP3 files and we’ll want to have our entire music library consisting of MP3 files. This is because MP3 is by far the most widely spread format, most compatible with … everything and even though it is not a lossless format, even though it is not the best for Internet streaming it is still good enough and most likely will still be for the following few years.
Lossy and lossless formats
A lossless format is a compression method in which the compression algorithms strictly conserve data, so that decompression will always return the original unaltered data. This is the method used for usual file archives (zip, rar, tar, etc.) in which everyone should agree that is expected that the files obtained after decompression will be the same as the original ones. No doubt about that.
There are still cases when a lossy compression method might be preferred. By contrast, a lossy method will not exactly conserve the original data, but it will conserve it in an approximate way so that it sufficiently resembles it. “Sufficiently” is not a term for documents, spreadsheets, database records, software archives and such, but it is adequate for sound, image and video, where the viewer/listener might not even perceive the difference in the loss of quality or might consider it acceptable. Of course, a lossy compression comes with a huge advantage in minimizing the archive size.
ID3 Tags
The first version of ID3 tags was designed with the MP3 format in mind, even though nowadays is more that a concept than what it originally was. There are two versions, 1 and 2 of ID3 tags, but they have little or almost nothing in common. ID3 version 2 is widely used now. ID3 tags represent metadata (data that describes data) and their purpose is to include additional information in an MP3 file, like the artist, title, track number, year, album, comments, even lyrics and album art (pictures).
A player will almost always look for these tags and will attempt to identify music from your library based on the information in these tags. The very least, you should consider maintaining a correspondence between the tags and the filename, that is, at least the artist and the title of the track. Last FM, as well as many plugins for messenging applications use these tags to identify what music you are playing and when. You can also get lyrics or album art from the Internet based on the information in these tags. And, at last, it is completely obvious that you can include tons of information that can help you organize your music in these tags, information that would otherwise be impossible to include in the filename.
Automatic Tagging
This is the best case. How do you do it? There are several ways of tagging files without having to type that info by hand but no matter how you do it, you still have to get that info from some kind of source, it has to come from somewhere.
The simplest and handy way is to extract that info from the filename, assuming the filename is correct. This works well, as long as those filenames are written correctly. Unfortunately this is not the case, most of the time, because filenames can show track artists and names in ANY way: numbered, unnumbered, with underscores (_) instead of spaces, without a dash (-) separating the artist from the name, misplacing info in some other order than artist - name.mp3 and many, many other situations. Just take a look at your own music to see how many types of filenames you have. Humans can read any crap, for computers this is harder.
Tag and Rename works fine by cleverly avoiding many “traps” in filenames, because it works based on regular expressions. Don’t worry, you don’t need to understand them, they are good enough just as they are. It will identify the artist and the title based on the position of the dash, it will strip spaces, replace underscores and dots with spaces, capitalize words and many more. You still need to be careful if you have more than one dash in your filename, usually in the artist’s name.
You can also use Tag and Rename to rename (doh!) your files based on the tag information, which is the quickest way to get rid of all the garbage in those filenames.
Tip: A quick way to fix both tags and filename in a file that has enough info in its title (with some garbage, too) is to write tags from the filename and then rename the file from the tags. The tags will have been written correctly as long as the filename has enough info and then the filename will be nicely fixed by the use of tags. Unfortunately, in Tag and Rename’s interface, the renaming button is on a different tab than the write tags butt
When you don’t have a track name at all (or not an usable one, at least) you can use online databases for identifying your tracks based on their hash (a pretty much unique code that results from the binary structure of the files) or on their name.
The following is a screenshot of the auto-tag from web feature in Media Monkey, which searched for complete tagging matched based on the filename (selected in the upper section):
Tagging from web in Media Monkey
Media Monkey can search several databases, like FreeDB, or even Amazon and can also write tags based on the filename (without searching on the web).
Winamp also has a similar cool feature, which works especially for files without a filename, as it searches the hash of the file. One of the first reasons for leaving file recompression as the last stage is that you won’t be able to do such a hash search after recompression, because the hash will change. To auto-tag a single file, simply open the file properties and click on auto-tag button. Here are the results before and after:
Auto-tagging a single file in Winamp
Quite nice and with minimal effort. It takes 2-3 seconds to calculate the hash and to query the online database. Still, having to do so for hundreds and thousands of files is suddenly not so fun anymore…
To tag multiple files, select them in the playlist, right-click on them and choose Send To > Auto-Tag. This will send multiple queries (about 20 at once) for each of the selected files and then wait for answers. You can check the results and decide whether you wish or don’t wish to apply the modifications.
Sending multiple files to Auto-Tag
One thing to note about Winamp’s auto tagger is that it will ALWAYS return a result, even if it is completely wrong. So Careful about that, check what it’s doing before applying. Usually, you only need to do so for tracks of which you know absolutely nothing and those shouldn’t be that many. For the rest, you may stick with the simple filename extraction method for artist and title.
Winamp running the auto-tagger
Manual tagging
Unfortunately, the least fun of them all is the manual tagging, but it comes down to this when automatic fails or when you just have to make minor adjustments. You cand use pretty much any of the programs shown here and many others. Just as a note, iTunes can be easily used to manually edit tags since you can just click in the corresponding column, even while listening the tracks and it will update the info automatically.
Fraierii
February 3rd, 2009
Razboiul invizibil din Georgia
August 15th, 2008
Întrebarea originală este disponibilă aici şi e încă deschisă răspunsurilor…
Na, că au şters întrebarea. Prostia are totuşi limite. Chiar şi la Yahoo.
I just heard on cnn that Chuck Norris is on the way to help the peeps down in georegia fight off those rushkies.. Nothing can stop chuck norris when hes on a mission to kill, even the invisible, soundless tanks created by the russians
La multi giga
August 5th, 2008
Rusinica
June 14th, 2008
Culmea culmilor, in frumuseţea de Visual Studio 2008, pe altă frumuseţe numită Windows Server 2008, avem cumplita plăcere de a admira resturile de pe fundul chiuvetei un icon din Windows 95. Sau, nu mai ştiu, File Manager (nu, nu Windows Explorer) exista in 3.1 ?
Unul sec…
May 19th, 2008
De pe site-ul bibliotecii nostre (nu mai ştiu dacă era vorba de UPB sau doar de facultatea noastră… în orice caz, un loc unde no man has gone before).
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