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.

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!   

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…

There were several others who mentioned that yeah, they tried too, but couldn’t get it to work and one or two who mentioned basically “give up” it’s a Windows program and it is only ever going to work on a Windows program… I mentioned that we may be starting to get close… and it was like I had pushed a button…

To minimize everything down to it’s sorry bottom line it was a case of whatever I said – I was wrong, because whatever the other person said – he was right. It went from being what I hoped would be a fun, fruitful and interesting discussion – to a negative response to whatever I said including all sorts of  “been there, done that, dont work” type comments from the other end. No real information on what was tried and what happened, just a straight out – “wont work because it wont”

It reminded me a lot about some of the other great blogs and forums that are out there ( ZDNet, PCMag, CNet, etc ) where ideas are raised and hopefully discussed, and questions are posed looking for answers, all of  which inevitably melts into a Linux/Windows/Mac sucks because Mac/Windows/Linux is the only thing that ever works right and will always be the best and “I’m right, you’re wrong”….

We have at our finger-tips one of the most powerful communications tools that man has ever created!

But… more and more it looks like humanity is devolving beyond kindergarten kids with no manners… petty little experts in their own minds who think the world needs to hear over and over and over again why they are right, and you are wrong….

What a waste….

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….

For Windows there was a plethora of choices, but only one stood out from the pack, Foxit and I’m glad to say that it not only works fast, but gives me everything I ever really want in a PDF document viewer:

• It’s extremely small in size – only 5MB vs the 20+MB of Adobe Acrobat
• It’s extremely fast – there is no waiting time, you click on the document and it opens!
• It converts PDF text into plain text if you want to save it later for editing etc ( trust me I’ve used this feature a lot! )
• It annotates text – kinda cool – and neat that I can do that to make things easier to find after reading a large document
• Lets you search through the PDF quickly looking for keywords
• Lets you zoom in and out ( changing the text size ) with a click of the scroll wheel
• Pages up and down with no effort and again one can use the scroll wheel

It installed easily and quickly, without any problems. Foxit also offers a complete line of PDF software, both commercial and free, from editors to creators and more…. for those who are just interested in downloading the Windows version go here…. www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads

So, with Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu 9.10, the choice was no where as wide. Clicking on the Ubuntu Software Centre icon and doing a search on PDF viewer generated only four real hits.

• Document Viewer ( which I already had – it was fast but even changing pages wasn’t easy )
• Okular  for multipurpose reading (which seemed okay, but with no feedback as to useage I wasn’t sure)
• Xpdf (which to be truthful does most of what I want but for some reason I just didn’t get excited with it)
• ePDFviewer ( which for lack of information I didn’t bother with )

There were several other packages but they all appeared to be for reading, cataloging etc etc ebooks…. and while they may have worked as a generic PDF viewer, I certainly didn’t want every PDF document that I read imported and cataloged into some database to haunt me for the rest of the softwares life…. which leads me to a little rant here….

I find that I really am enjoying Ubuntu 9.10, or Karmic Koala as it is called, BUT the one item that drives me a little crazy has to be the updated “Ubuntu Software Centre.” Yes it looks real pretty, put please give us back the functionality of the older software tool! I depended upon the quick synopsis and more importantly the ratings system that it had. If a product had 5 stars I knew I could pretty well count on being satisfied with the product and 3 stars meant that value may or may not be there…. but giving me just pretty pictures and a very small description really doesn’t do anything for anyone…..

I wondered if Foxit had an Ubuntu version…. as I am finding more and more that many software companies – especially those who develop software for free use – are developing releases for other platforms as well.

Some googling around showed that indeed Foxit had tried to develop a version for Ubuntu, but that it didn’t work/install very well. So I went to their website to see what the problems were and if they had made any other versions that might have improved upon the issues and found that yes indeed, they have been and still are working on many, many versions and generating new releases for several platforms! All of which can be found here…. www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/download.html Awesome!

I downloaded the latest .deb package and let my software manager handle the installation…. which it did quite handily, without any problem, and then tested it out on several test documents and ALL worked and viewed and printed fine…. Suffice to say that for Ubuntu 9.10 at least they got all the bugs ironed out!

So my recommendations? If you want to stay within the strict Ubuntu “opensource” environment then go with Xpdf. It works fine and gives you most of the functionality that people need when viewing PDF documents. If you want a little more, and want to keep your support/software options in sync with Windows then go with the Foxit solution. It works great and is identical regardless of the platform!

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…

I just reviewed that old article and checked all it’s links, and I’m glad to say that it still works, and you can still get to the website to order his CD’s and Books ( for those in a hurry here it is here…. www.capcan.com/forster.htm and no I don’t get paid for it – save for the warm feelings that is ) unfortunately a sample that someone had graciously put a link in ( for those who may never have heard him )  no longer works, so I went looking for a new sound byte for you.

One of the first things that I did come across, was a very recent article, on the Senior Living website, written by Gipp. It’s a reminiscence of younger days and growing up and as I read it I could hear his voice… he really does have magic in it. You can find the article here www.seniorlivingmag.com/articles/where-have-all-the-flowers-gone. They also now sell the CD’s of Gipp Forsters Christmas Volume 1 and Volume 2, so now there is a second source from which one can purchase his magical recordings!

I finally found an on-line sample, actually an advertisement from Dave Baglo Broadcast Productions for stations who can acquire Christmas Specials and recordings already formatted for broadcast, with that wonderful Chorus/jingl singing “It Feels Like Christmas” followed by a sample of Gipp… it’s magic…. www.thegiftofchristmas.com/IFLC_Demo_2009.

I sure hope one of our local stations pick it up for the season…. it will really start to fell like Christmas when I hear that sound coming through the radio’s speakers….