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So if you recall, yesterday I was chatting about how great the WDTV is for playing audio by such things as performer and genre.

What I didn’t mention yesterday, was the challenge I had finding all the songs I thought should have been marked as Christmas ( ’tis the season after all ) in the Christmas genre, they were all over the place. To the point that I was only playing about 1/5 of all the files I had saved as Christmas music! The rest were tagged as Holidays, Party, Jazz, Children’s, etc etc etc. How to fix them so that they were all marked as Christmas was my dilema.

Sure I could manually go in and edit the properties of each file individually, but that would have been painful and taken way too long. So I went on another quest, to find a tool that would let me “bulk update” a whole list of song cuts with the genre I thought they should be in, and not the one that the ripping software either thought it should be, or worse, that wasn’t marked at all….

This was a tougher task than I had thought. To me this is the sort of need, with all the iTunes and MP3 players out there, that tons of people had already fixed…. Now to be truthful, maybe that tool is available within some of these tools, like iTunes, but I don’t use them, nor do I want to. So, I had to find another way to do it.

Suffice to say, I found a gem called mp3tagtools, which works like a charm. It unfortunately only works in Windows (for those of us who like the Linux environment ) and doesn’t even play well with Wine. So it is strictly a Windows tool.

There really isn’t any installation, it’s a stand-alone tool. Just run it, or click on it,  and you will be presented with a GUI/window with which you can list all the music in a folder or a library. Within the list you can tag which cuts you wish to modify, select (there are dozens of genres already available ) or create your own and click “Write Tags” and it’s done. It’s that simple.

Actually it’s a little too simple, and dangerous, because there is no undo feature available, and since the last time this program was updated was in 2003, I suspect there won’t be any more features added either… pity, because it really does need an undo. Everyone makes mistakes…

What I recommend is to copy some songs to play with into a separate folder, so that you get familiar with how the program works and experiment a bit before trying to modify anything in your library.

If you look at the web page, it seems to be able to do other things as well, but for me, just the fact that it bulk updates my music files, is all I really needed it to do, and it does that very, very well.

So I got a neat little gadget from my daughter and her partner a while back – it’s called a WDTV or (Western Digital TeleVision) and I have to tell you – it’s pretty cool!

I’ve been using it pretty extensively now for I think almost a year and it has worked flawlessly. What’s it do? Here’s a short list:

• Plays any type of media content you can think of – Video, Stills and Audio
• Connects to either a regular TV (red, white, yellow) or a HDTV at 1080p ( red, white, green, blue, red or HDMI )
• Connects to two USB  powered external drives at the same time or two USB memory sticks
• Is heavily supported by Western Digital, with numerous easy upgrades
• Can be converted, with a bit of work, to a Linux media player using one of the external hard drives
• Can use play lists for both audio and video files
• Can play videos/audio/pictures by either folder, genre, random or author
• Is supported by a huge on-line community/forum

This little box – and it is VERY little, approximately 3 inches by 5 inches by 2 inches in diameter, is  very impressive and I’ve converted a lot of my CD’s to MP3 just so I can access them whenever I want to. Instead of going to my wall cabinet and pulling out CD’s that I want to listen to, I just look them up on my WDTV, plus I can mix and match as I choose.

I’ve also ripped a lot of the kids movies and put them onto the hard drive, it makes life a lot easier when you try to entice two very fickle grandsons who quickly decide they don’t want to watch one movie but rather another, having them all at ones finger tips makes the whole process quite painless…

My only small complaint I might have, is on the rewind of my movies that I’ve put on the hard drive for easy access. The rewind doesn’t update the rewound picture at a sufficient enough rate to decide how far back one has gone, so sometimes I rewind too far, and other times not far enough, it’s a real “trial and error” process which is a bit of a pain, but one I’m willing to put up with in order to use all the other great benefits!

Another really neat feature I discovered is that after selecting what music I want to listen to, I can go back to the main menu and put on a slide show of my favorite pictures that I’ve also saved (these can even be on the same external hard drive if you choose) which can lead to wonderful energy throughout the house.

Although I have to warn you, if you use pictures of your grandkids you can spend hours in front of the TV just oohing and ahhhing over their “younger” pictures…. one tends to fall into a time warp when looking at grandkid pictures…. so be warned!   

So I’ve been distracted for the last couple of days trying to get a great little flight simulator called RealFlight to work on Virtualbox ( a stand alone Windows environment ) within my Ubuntu 9.10 environment.

It would start the main menu, but then fail when I tried to go further, complaining that the graphics card couldn’t handle pixel shaders ( a feature found in advanced graphics cards – which mine supposedly does. ) and I did my usual Google search looking for what other people may be trying or having problems with, and hopefully what they may have found that worked…

The best potential hit was on the RealFlight forum itself…. Which sort of made sense, if anyone has had experience with that sort of problem, I’ll probably find them there… and I actually found someone who was actually trying to get it to run in Wine ( another type of Windows emulator for Linux .) He was having problems getting the software to find the controller. I responded to him that I had installed RealFlight on my Virtualbox and it looked like it saw the controller ( it actually insisted that it be plugged in before continuing ) but that I ran into a pixel shader problem and thought that perhaps we were getting close because the main menu worked on my machine, but when I tried to go further the shader problem popped up. I asked if anyone had any experience with this issue and what they might recommend…

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As you are probably aware by now, almost every manual and “official” document that you find on the Internet ( and in business ) is in PDF (Portable Document Format). It was designed by Adobe Systems and ( thankfully ) in 2008 they released it as an open format. What this meant was that other companies could then legally design tools to view, edit and create PDF files without Adobe going after them for copyright/patent violations.

The reason I said “thankfully” is because although Adobe made and released a great software program that allowed one to read PDF format files ( originally called Acrobat Reader ), this at first wonderful piece of software became bogged down into newer, better, more powerful versions. Which resulted in bigger, slower, more cumbersome versions…. to the point that on some older computers the reader would take OVER a minute to load up before you could use it! It was worse than watching paint dry!

So the search was on for a PDF viewer that was faster and as powerful ( yes some of those add-ons that Adobe came out with were useful ) as the original Adobe Acrobat was, but faster…. oh please much faster….

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This time of year is when Christmas slowly creeps into my veins, it’s the little things, not the advertising that does it. When my wife and I were younger we always started our Christmas shopping the day after Remembrance Day ( Nov 11 ), but that was before the Internet and on-line shopping. We also had a lot of out of town gifts to buy back then, and we wanted to make sure that we got the parcels in the mail in time to get to their destinations before Christmas. We don’t get out to the stores nearly as much as we used to. I assume that is true for a lot of people now ( or at least those reading this blog ) but I still think of those days…

Another thing that makes me think of Christmas this time of year is my blog – believe it or not…

I have to admit that I don’t get a lot of traffic, which is all right I suppose – it puts less demand on me delivering an article every day, but what has happened every year since I wrote my article on trying to find Gipp Forster’s recordings, is that my traffic starts to increase around this time as more and more people start searching for his Gipp’s Christmas recordings. ( I guess the radios aren’t playing him  and his stories as much as they used to ) and the main reason most people find my little old blog is because they are searching for him… I like to think that because of that one article, they have an easier way of finding him and that makes me feel quite warm inside…

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