Monthly Archive for August, 2007

id3.exe – ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files

Published on August 29, 2007 in audio-video, music and tool. 4 Comments

I want to mention a little tool that helped me out twice in the last week, and that I find very little info about online. It’s a Windows command-line MP3 file tagger and renamer called id3.exe. Since I forgot where I downloaded it from and Google doesn’t give me a clue either: here’s where you can download id3.exe.

ID3.exe can do several things, of which I will just cite the things I actually used:

  • it can obviously set ID3 tags in MP3 files (that is, ID3v1 and v2). The first time it adds ID3v2 tags which are stored in the beginning of the file (necessary when you need the info right when you start reading the file, like with streaming), the whole file has to be rewritten, but subsequent modifications are really fast.
    id3.exe -1 -2 -g [genre] -c "[Copyright notice]" -l "[Album name]" "%OUTPUT%"
  • set the ID3 tags of one file to those of another. I needed this when I transcoded MP3 files to a lower bitrate with LAME. LAME does not copy the existing ID3 tags to the new file. So I used ID3.exe to just copy those from the source file.
    id3.exe -D %INPUT% -1 -2 "%OUTPUT%"
  • Rename the file according to the MP3 tags. I had a big collection of MP3 files called “01 Track01″ without any MP3 tags. I first set the ID3 tags based upon the folder structure (the folder name was the Album name), and then renamed them to “[Artist name] – [Album name] - [Track N°].mp3″.
    id3.exe -2 -f "%%a - %%l - %%t.rbs" "%OUTPUT%"
  • Id3 can also deduct album names, artist, song titles and track number from the complete filename + path.

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My first picture in the papers

Published on August 23, 2007 in Belgium, photography and Tango. 3 Comments

De Morgen: artikel
An Baccaert wrote an article in De Morgen about Nathalie and Andrés, who are representing the Benelux in the ‘Mundial de Tango‘ in Buenos Aires. She wanted a nice picture to include with the article and came across one I made at the Tango Marathon in June.

She asked me if she could use it, and because An is a friend of mine, because I know Nathalie, because I use a Creative Commons license and maybe also a bit because I like the idea of having an image of mine in the papers, I agreed. So there it is: my first newspaper publication!

(hat tip to Clopin for getting me the PDF version!)

What Google Agenda currently misses

Published on August 22, 2007 in Google and Web2.0. 3 Comments

I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (‘only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ’1 week in advance’, ’1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:

Google Agenda: desired features

Metadata/Folksonomy

Currently an event in the agenda has the fields Title, Date/time (with recurrency, if any) , Location and Description. What I really miss is Tags (or categories, keywords, whatever you want to call them). Tags would allow me to attribute events to categories so that I can easily slice and dice them: only display the “milonga’s”, the events in Antwerp, the events in a specific place. Now I had to write a modified ‘filtered printable view’ for PHPiCalendar so that I can search on specific words in the event title, but that is really a hack. E.g. I now ask every editor to create the event titles as

“[TYPE]: [name of the event] @ [LOCATION]“

so that I can filter on “CONCERT:” or “@ Gent”. With the tags “concert, gent, polariteit, openair” it would be so much easier.

The iCalendar specification even mentions a ‘Categories’ field, although Google Agenda currently does not use it.

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Weekday colours (Ayurveda)

Published on August 21, 2007 in color. 6 Comments

My girlfriend recently introduced me to the fact that the days of the week have associated colours, and that one might take these into account when choosing what to wear, to eat or  -in my case- what to drink. The colours are defined by the Ayurveda, the “ancient system of health care that is native to the Indian subcontinent“.

Since I always forget what colour of underwear to put on on which days, I’ll write it down here:
ayurveda colors

Monday: Lord Shiva rules on Mondays. White is the colour for Mondays and therefore wearing white dresses and keeping white flowers at home are recommended on Mondays. It is a good day for men seeking favours from women and for making new friends. Taking honey and cucumber on Mondays is likely to yield good results. Continue reading ‘Weekday colours (Ayurveda)’