thefoundation

iTunes Library Management

2009-10-20T22:41:22Z

iTunes does a great job in playing music. Once your library is set up iTunes works like charm, at least on a mac. But when you want to keep a custom folder structure or manage unsorted or badly tagged mp3 files iTunes really sucks.

There is a whole bunch of mp3 files with really bad ID3 tags in my music folder (which by the way is from a time when Winamp was almost the only way to playback mp3 files). Then some CDs were ripped without connection to the CDDB, thus have only the artist and album field tagged. Furthermore the aforementioned Winamp does a great job displaying files which do not contain any ID3 data. Which of course results in files without any data in iTunes – especially if you simply drop them into iTunes without switching off library management! Bad idea.

Since quite a while now I am working on cleaning up my iTunes library. I am following a strategy of small steps. Every time I stumble upon a badly or incompletely tagged file I take my time to correct and complete all the data.

On my way to the pedanticly uncluttered library I came across some helpers which saved me a lot of time – perhaps you already know them, they were new to me!

TriTag

TriTag converts filenames to ID-Tags and vice versa. You can define a pattern which then will be translated into ID3 tags. Before you apply your pattern you will get a preview, even a Pattern builder is included (though you won't need it)! This tool is so damn helpful, I can hardly imagine how I managed managing my music all these years without having a tool like this at hand.

Get the tool at the developers site:
http://www.feedface.com/software/tritag.html

MP3 Scan+Repair

Some of my mp3 files were rejected by iTunes, no matter wether I tried importing them via file menu or just dropped them into my library. Re-encoding of mp3 files is no solution, since you're loosing sound quality. Finder and VLC played the affected files just fine, but my Console caught an error thrown by VLC during playback of the bad files: org.videolan.vlc: [mp3 @ 0x8b7a10]Header missing
The fact that obviously my files were missing some important information, suggested to alter my search pattern from blaming iTunes for rejecting my files to how to repair mp3 files.
This finally led me to MP3 Scan+Repair (previously named MP3 Validator) which solved the problem faster than I could imagine.

Get MP3 Scan+Repair at the developer's site:
http://triq.net/mac/mp3-validator-mac-os-x

Get Lyrical

Okay, this last one is not really needed, but it does a great job completing your meta information! Get Lyrical automatically fetches lyrics from http://lyrics.wikia.com/ and saves them in the lyrics field of iTunes. This is especially nice if you own an iPhone which displays the lyrics on your standby screen during playback!

Get Lyrical is available at:
http://shullian.com/get_lyrical.php

You can download the three tools for free. Please consider to make a donation to the developers. In particular as these tools might save you quite a lot of time!

Google Earth Plug-in and Shiretoko

2009-05-10T15:11:16Z

While not officially supported, the Google Earth Browser Plug-in seems to work just fine with nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3.5, codename Shiretoko. Here is a simple hint to get it up and running.

When accessing the plug-in homepage using Shiretoko, Google tells you that your Browser version is not supported. Of course there is a reason for that. Messing around with untested software, especially with plug-ins, might hurt your user experience or data in ways I cannot predict here.

That said, the recent nightly builds on the Firefox 3.5 / Mozilla 1.9.1 branch seem to be pretty stable, at least on Mac OS 10.5. To get it running, you have to fire up about:config and change the key general.useragent.extra.firefox to something like Firefox/3.0.10. Now reload the Plug-in Homepage, download and install the Google Browser plug-in. After that, you have to keep the modified user-agent or the plug-in will cease to work.

Keep in mind that this might affect which add-on versions will be offered to you at addons.mozilla.org. Come to speak of it, I recently tried out the Minimap Sidebar that kind of gives your browser a Google Earth in the sidebar (or in a full tab). Really great: It allows you to switch between Google Maps, Google Earth and the awesome OpenStreetMap at any time without loosing position or bookmarks. It also integrates with various other location based services such as WikiMapia or loc.alize.us.

Thoughts on Apple's Color

2009-01-12T23:22:03Z

Sometimes while working with computers you run into stupid problems. The computer wants you to start everything from the beginning, only because you forgot to set a setting. But mostly, one hour of creative thinking lets you develop a fast solution. This time I ran into Apple's Color.

After I solved my problem with Color it again approved our way of working:

Never choose the think less, click more way of solving an issue...

But now to my problem: My friend Jens from Barracuda Film helped me out on a color grading project a fellow student shot last summer. We worked with Apple's Color 1.04 on am MacPro. He worked the entire weekend on that project, but when I came to the studio today and wanted to render the grades and export everything to Final Cut Pro, I discovered that Color's framerate setting was set to 24 fps. Unfortunately Color does not allow you to change this setting during working, so the rendered ProRes Quicktime files were all in 24fps. And the timeline export to Final Cut Pro was also in 24fps so the sound was not in sync anymore. We had a DVCPRO HD 25fps timeline in Final Cut Pro. But the editor worked with sequences as source material, so we had a timeline full of nested sequences and Color cannot deal with that at all. So the send to Color option was not a good deal for us. Because the film is only about 15 minutes long we decided to add the edits in Color while grading. In Color the source footage was in 25fps, but the project was set to 24fps. And that messed it up as I discovered later...

I searched every handbook, forum, website which had anything to do with that problem but none had a solution for me. But then I tried my own Shake style way. Because Shake saves everything in a script you can alter it, i.e. when Shake keeps on crashing on boot up, because it can't find the source footage. In this case you can solve the problem by relinking the footage manually or simply disabling the node.
In my case Apple hides everything in the color project file. You have to access the content by right clicking it and then show package content. There your find a file with the ending *.pdl . In this file Color saves a lot of stuff including the framerate setting. I simply changed this setting in row 6 to 25fps and Color started without crashing. After that the final renderings were correct and the export to Final Cut Pro worked. I think this only worked so easily because the source footage is also in 25fps. But I wonder why this setting is greyed out in the GUI.

AERenderer and its flaws

2008-11-01T19:24:45Z

The render system coming with After Effects provides a sophisticated set of configuration dialogs. Be careful using these options!

Working for the illuminated facade of the Spardabank Hessen e.G. headquarter in Frankfurt we have several giant (up to about 7000 pixels wide) After Effects compositions. Some of these setups take hours and hours in the process of rendering.
Due to different needs, we do not always need the full resolution. Fortunately the AERenderer has this small dialog to reduce the actual size a composition is rendered at: Render every [n]th pixel. Unfortunately this will not work as expected in every composition!

One would presume, that the rendering of just every umpteenth pixel works like a pre-rendering-resizing and besides speeds up the whole process because the pixels in between are not computed.
Not knowing exactly what causes errors at this step, I presume that there is a incompatibility of some plug-ins with this functionality of the renderer. Which is especially irksome, since some of the most performance-consuming effects will cause errors in the final display, e. g. the glow effect.

The last composition I had to render wanted to have about 50 hours of full power from my MacBook Pro (2.33 gigahertz, 2 gigabyte RAM) in full resolution. The rendering of every twentieth pixel resulted in a way darker image, than the full resolution rendering. Large parts of the composition are lightened by the mentioned glow effect. In the end I decided to render full resolution in low quality. This took about twenty hours.

Maybe Adobes hands are tied since some plug-ins are programmed by third parties, but at least the default effects supplied by Adobe should work properly. Perhaps this option is not used frequently, so that there is low interest in solving this problem. Perhaps just few people know about this possibility. Anyhow Adobe should improve the rendering process as soon as possible.

SSH Tunnel Manager icon

2008-10-20T19:06:16Z

If you ever worked in a non-optimal development environment, which required the setup of several SSH-tunnels, you probably fell back on using the SSH Tunnel Manager, and very likely you got irritated by the pinkish and stylized sketch of a tunnel and flower which appeared in your Dock.

Sketch of the icon

Opening Photoshop, dusting my Wacom-Tablett were the first things I did, after extensively working on a project, assisted by this tiny and incredibly helpful application called SSH Tunnel Manager. This application really sped things up and I really appreciate Yann Bizeuls work although I am getting to love the bash more and more these days! To make peace between my Dock and the SSH Tunnel Manager I sketched a small image of a mole. This image is only restricted suitable as an application icon – but far more pleasant to the eye, than this tunnel. Just my 2¢.
Perhaps I will find time to improve this icon a bit. Nonetheless, from a realistic point of view I can promise: it will never fit the correct guidelines and detailed style guides, Apple released! Sorry for that.

The final icon

Changing the icon

Reclaim your Dock!

This is easy. Select the mole.icns from the attached ZIP-file (see below) and hit ⌘ – c. Now open the Get Info (⌘ &ndash i) inspector for SSH Tunnel Manager from your Finder's Application window. Click on the small icon in the upper left (there should be a blue glow around) and hit ⌘ – v. The old icon should be replaced by the mole.

This is for you, hard-boiled GUI fetishists

Any changes will be at your own risk. The author of this text will not be liable for any damages, direct or consequential.

If the Dock icon is not enough for you and the icon in the application interface also should be replaced by the curious blind mole, there is a way. Promise to be careful. Then navigate to your application folder in Finder (or wherever you installed the SSH Tunnel Manager) and right-click Show package content. Navigate through the hierarchy Contents → Resources and replace the two files stm.icns and stm.tif with the two in the attached ZIP-file (see below). Now (re-)start your SSH Tunnel Manager – you should be done!

Download the icon

http://www.thefoundation.de/files/daniel/images/Icon_SSH-Tunnel-Manager.zip

SSH Tunnel Manager Icon von Daniel J. Becker steht unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Deutschland Lizenz.
Beruht auf einem Inhalt unter www.thefoundation.de.