my music

Been spending a couple of days organizing my music. I realize it has been 2 yrs since I blogged about how fantastic the ipod is and how much I lurve itunes. So after 2 yrs.. I'm glad to say that I've improved on my skills in using itunes. See how user friendly it is!

I used to dread it when people ask me what kind of music I listen to. Well, I still do.. Cos I'm not the hiphop/alternative/indie or whatever cool music kind of person so it's kinda embarrassing. But at least now I know what I like a bit better. After listening to the 100 Best Loved Classicals, I can safely say that I love classical music! It gives me a high whenever I listen to it.

I also listen to very mainstream pop. Haha. So not cool.

So, why do I have to spend so much time organizing my music once in a while? I'm the kind of anal person who needs to have all my music named prettily. Some of my rules for the moment include:

1. id3 tags and file name itself have to be named properly
2. Better still if there's album information, year information and album art. Pretty!
3. All File Names Have To Start With A Capital Letter
4. If there is more than one artist, the convention is either 'Field Mob Ft. Ciara' or 'Puff Daddy & Faith Evans', cannot have 'Feat.' or 'Featuring' or 'and'
   
5. Chinese songs must also be in chinese (unicode of course)
6. Chinese artists, if they have an english name, must have it spelled: 'Ocean 欧得洋'
   

I have a total of 2281 songs, 11.48GB which iTunes tells me can last me for 6.4 days. It's not gonna be very fun to rename them one by one.. Especially since I'm kinda fickle minded and like to change my naming conventions now and then. So now and then I try to look for programs to simplify my task. Ok, Here is the list of (free!) tools I use to update my itunes.


1. iTunes Library Updater (iTLU)

This is a fantastic program which solves the main, in-your-face problem of iTunes not updating its library with your actual Windows Folder's contents. So if you delete or rename a mp3, iTunes does not detect it until it tries to play it. There may be like mp3s here and there which are orphaned and yet you can't sort by the '!' mark so you gotta select them One by One every time they appear.

This lovely program does the following which I love:

• Add new songs in your folder to iTunes library automatically
• Update track info
  
• Clean up orphaned entries
  

Get it here.


2. ID3 renamer

This allows you to choose how you want to rename a folder of mp3s. You can specify a Renaming Formula such as '%Artist - %Title' or '%Track - %Title' using the id3 tag information. It also allows you to capitalize the first letter of each word. However the last time I tried it didn't work for my chinese named files. Other than that it works seamlessly with english tracks.

Beautiful.

Get it here.


3. Mix Meister BPM analyzer

With my latest attempts to hit the gym, it's way easier, and more fun with some suitable music to keep your momentum. Found some workout music in iTunes shop from Nike+, as well as a Podrunner podcast (Free!) by DJ Steve Boyett which is organized by Beats Per Minute (BPM) so you can choose how fast you wanna go. These are electronic music with little/no lyrics, they work fine for the gym but personally I prefer songs with lyrics. So it would be fantastic if I could organize my songs by BPM!

Luckily I found this program which is FREE! Super cool and it is really fast. Just specify a folder, and it will go through all the mp3s to analyze the BPM and store it in the id3 tags. Next I just have to run my iTLU and the BPM information will appear in all my tracks in iTunes.

Here's the part where I really appreciate iTunes. Smart Playlists! Create a new Smart Playlist, choose a range of BPMs, and there you go. A playlist with your own songs (chinese/english/classical/whatever!) ready to go into your ipod! Hmm maybe now I need an ipod shuffle for my run.

Get it here.

4. Video to Ipod Converter

The company DVDVideoSoft creates a whole list of very useful conversion software to convert things like .flv, .avi into ipod/psp formats. They cater for all sorts of video ipods such as my 5th Generation ipod as well as the Touch or iPhone.

Basically you just select the .avi file and it will convert it into .mp4 format in the right screen resolution for your iPod/PSP.

There is a whole list of software, get the 'Youtube to iPod' converter to convert .flv files into .mp4.

My only grouse is that it can't do a batch conversion so you gotta select your files one by one, wait for one file to finish conversion (typically 15 min for an episode?) before selecting the next. But well, good enough for me.

Get it here.


5. Downloading from tudou

Armed with the video converter, where do you get your .flv files from? Either youtube, or a very convenient way is to click to display the video you want in www.tudou.com, then replace the 'tudou' with 'kisstudou' in the URL. A link will then pop up allowing you to download the .flv file for that video.

For example, if the video you want is at link 'http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/abcde/', in the URL textbox, type 'http://www.kisstudou.com/programs/view/abcde/' and press enter. A new page will appear with a '下载地址' link to the .flv file, just right click and download it. Of course the quality will suck but my 5th gen ipod screen is so small so it doesn't matter that much anyways and it's much faster.

6. Conversion to mp3

Just some notes on how to convert some formats to mp3, something I encountered the past 2 days.

For .flac to mp3

This can be done via winamp and iTunes!

In winamp:

1. Select Options | Preferences
2. Choose Plug-ins | Output in the treeview on the left
3. Select 'Nullsoft Disk Writer' and click 'Configure' button
4. Select the directory to save your .wav file to and click OK
   
5. Close the 'Winamp Preferences' dialog
6. Select File | Add Media to Library... and add whatever .flac files you want to convert
7. With the .flac files in your winamp library, press play
8. All the 'played' .flac files will be converted to .wav files stored in the directory specified
9. Now remember to switch your Output back to 'Nullsoft Direct Sound Output' so that you can actually play songs in the future.
   

Now open iTunes:

1. Import the newly created .wav files
2. iTunes will convert them to .mp3s!
   

For .m4u to .mp3

Don't know how I ripped these CDs but I somehow saved the files as .m4u instead of .mp3. This is fine, and of course it is not recommended to go further convert a lossy format into another lossy format. But I'm no audiophile so I can't tell the difference anyway, and the BPM analyzer can't analyze my .m4u files so I decided to standardize everything into mp3s.

Just open them in iTunes, right click and select 'Convert Selection to MP3'. Duh. Why am I even writing this.

Hey There Delilah - Plain White T's

Hey there Delilah
What's it like in New York City?
I'm a thousand miles away
But girl, tonight you look so pretty
Yes you do
Times Square can't shine as bright as you
I swear it's true

Hey there Delilah
Don't you worry about the distance
I'm right there if you get lonely
Give this song another listen
Close your eyes
Listen to my voice, it's my disguise
I'm by your side

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
What you do to me

Hey there Delilah
I know times are getting hard
But just believe me, girl
Someday I'll pay the bills with this guitar
We'll have it good
We'll have the life we knew we would
My word is good

Hey there Delilah
I've got so much left to say
If every simple song I wrote to you
Would take your breath away
I'd write it all
Even more in love with me you'd fall
We'd have it all

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me

A thousand miles seems pretty far
But they've got planes and trains and cars
I'd walk to you if I had no other way
Our friends would all make fun of us
and we'll just laugh along because we know
That none of them have felt this way
Delilah I can promise you
That by the time we get through
The world will never ever be the same
And you're to blame

Hey there Delilah
You be good and don't you miss me
Two more years and you'll be done with school
And I'll be making history like I do
You'll know it's all because of you
We can do whatever we want to
Hey there Delilah here's to you
This one's for you

Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
Oh it's what you do to me
What you do to me.

Vietnam Day 4 - Dalat

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Ah. How come I still have one post left.. zzz.

Ok. Let's get this over and done with! This is our 2nd day in Dalat. I love the little courtyard in Empress Hotel that overlooks Xuan Huong lake, and even has wifi. Too bad we were only staying for a night.

Breakfast was okay.. and here came our Easy Riders! yay.

They said that big luggage was no problem.. and they were right. They easily tied our luggages to the back of the bike with strips of tyre rubber. Now we have backrests!

some marketing for them.


da lat city, while we were drawing $ from a bank









school children doing their morning exercises


1. Chua Linh Phuoc temple


the whole temple's walls are made up of a colorful mosaic of broken beer bottles and porcelain bowls!








fantastic views from the top of the temple




2. Cable Car ride







i bought this silly horn from the cable car souvenir shop. musical instrument from vietnam, check. sadly it has a huge crack.. should have wrapped it nicely b4 putting in my luggage =(


3. Tuyen Lam Lake




4. Bonsai Garden

5. Truc Lam (Bamboo Forest) Zen Monastery. Ok I cheated. The lake, bonsai garden and the monastery are all in the same area. Oh, in fact they are all next to the cable car station! Fantastic views nonetheless.

6. Datanla Falls. Today we truly understood the difference between unspoilt nature and tourist destinations. Today's places were full of souvenirs and admission tickets, unlike yesterday's country tour. Even this waterfalls had admission tickets and lots of touristy nonsense. Well we only had about half a day so we're lucky to be even seeing anything so we weren't complaining.

5000d = 40 cents. after a very very long walk down..






why there is a horse and why we are in cowboy suits in front of the waterfalls, do not ask.



and there's this rollercoaster that you can sit down to the bottom of the falls and up! too bad we had walked all the way down already so we could only go up. It's kinda like the luge at sentosa.




up we go! beats having to walk all the way back up. didn't go down again cos we would have to go up again (!?)



while pb was lazing in his hammock, tintin pulled me over and showed me.. elephant mountain


7. chicken village. this is the minority village that hung termed as 'touristic' yesterday.. and full of shops.. yeah there were some shops but it was ok..


8. silk weaving

the nice lady sat us down and served us tea.. after which they showed us how they weave patterns into their silk. we were a lil worried that they would start forcing us to buy their stuff but they were pretty gentle and nice.. didn't hardsell us too much. I really wanted to get something but didn't see anything I like. On hindsight luckily i didn't buy anything.. haha.

poor monkey is chained to the tree and it looked really, really sad. =(


chicken! the legend is that some guy had to find a chicken with 9 spikes at its feet in order to marry his love.. he never found it though. so here it is.



this is a hospital set up by an ang moh called Linda Burns. a doctor/nurse comes here every thursday to check on the villagers.


the children's classroom. total of 2 classrooms make up their school.


carrots. weather has been too hot and dry so out of a lot of plots, only a few plots were growing crops.


french architecture







their bag quite cool hor


after chicken village, it was lunch time!


jars of herbal/snake wine


this is freaking gross lah. it's not only filled with snake, there's a freaking bird there on top complete with feathers.. urgh how to drink!



you gotta cut the chilli padi yourself with a spoon


loved this! it's like wanton but instead of the floury skin, they used cabbage! fantastic stuff.



fly infested rice


every good local coffeeshop must have the obligatory flies and doggy going round and round your tables scavenging for food


after another fantastic meal, it was time to sit down and write a testimonial for our new found friends.. it wasn't difficult to write good stuff about them. we even included our photos, haha.





9. incense making


frangipani/magnolia.. dunno


something about Buddha taking 7 steps once he was born

ok, i have never put any thought into how incense sticks were made. huh, not factory made meh? now we know that a little lady in a temple in dalat makes each incense stick by hand, taking a pink-painted bamboo stick, and rolling some cinnamon powder together with that sticky paste to make each incense stick.

and i finally got to wear the vietnamese cone hat! yay... free one summore no need to buy. just gope from their table hee..


have to test whether the cone hat is effective in the sun. it is really good, notice it provides his whole head and neck shade.


after shaping the sticks, they are laid out in the sun to be dried for hours.



this is the most wtf place we went to.. any idea?


it's actually a wood+anything you can make out of wood place.. 10. wood factory? the above picture shows a chair made out of wood.


this huge trunk can be made into a table top.


noticed that each city we enter has these signs, and as you leave the city they have the same sign with a red diagonal stroke across the picture signifying that you are leaving it!


ohh.. deja vu.. this is like the construction site we went into yesterday when we just reached da lat..


another mysterious site!


11. Mushroom farm


turned out that tintin was showing pb rows and rows of mushrooms! these are nylon bags of limestone and somehow the shrooms will sprout out.


dry the shrooms! Also a pretty fascinating place, how they can just dry the mushrooms along the road, no one steal meh?


this boy very smiley



we were on our way to the airport when we suddenly stopped.. hung asked us to cross the road to see 12. Waterfall


haha. this was pushing it a little.. some drain and they ask us to see.. ok, if there actually was water it might have been pretty magnificent but there was hardly a trickle.. =)



and we reached the airport at 2.


security guard eyeing their bikes


bye hung


bye tintin

so we said our byebyes to our 2 dalat friends who had taken really good care of us in just 1.5 days. we were taken around safely, to places we would never be able to explore to by ourselves, and to eat food we would never be able to order by ourselves. didn't even have to think about the itinerary, it was totally stress free. shiok. hopefully we will have a chance to come back to vietnam and take a longer easy rider tour.

oh, and before we left, hung asked us to take care in hcmc cos, people aren't as nice there in the city.. awww.

sooper cute baby at the airport who refused to smile at us. i tink he looks like tao2 da4 yu3.


someday i shld try using cartons as my luggage..


that's all the luggage there is?



our flight was at 4+ and it was only 2+ so we went to find some food



lemon juice and his stupid instant mee + veg




probably one of the few flights the airport serves



back in saigon!

dinner at Pho2000 where Bill Clinton dined when he visited Saigon. even though we know that the food can't be compared to the cheaper, dirtier and more authentic/local versions in the market, we still loved it. the hygienic outlook was a plus point, even the utensils were wrapped in plastic which i appreciated.

i tried the sapodilla/chiku/ren2 xin4 guo1 juice.. it's really good. walked around the night market near ben thanh.


greedy pb pretending to know how to choose durians


the durian wasn't very yummy and we didn't finish it

this super cute sweet little girl went around asking people to buy her flowers.. she is so pretty!

did a 'Manicure and Pedicure with french tip' in one of the salons, while pb did a massage. First they did the cuticle and heel scraping stuff.. oh their armchairs were also a massage chair so it was quite comfortable! After the cuticle stuff, I saw them take out a white polish and clear polish. huh? why no base color one? I tried to ask them and the pretty vietnamese girl strutted over and held my hand.. a little french tip ok? very nice.. Hmm. ok. fine.

i never seem to learn not to engage in such beauty routines in foreign lands where fashion is different AND i can't even communicate properly with them. not even after my hair ended up in tiger-like bleach stripes from my bangkok trip.

So that's not all. They started painting like, half of each of my fingers with the white polish instead of drawing a nice white tip. wth? i just bit my tongue and let them continue.. next they took a brush, dipped it in nail polish remover and erased away the unwanted parts, before ending with a clear coat of varnish. quite idea lah, just that this way you can't put any base coat beneath the french tips.

looks quite decent eh? very natural right.

After pb came out of his massage, he decided to join me and do the heel scraping thing too. they use the blade thing to cut away dead skin on your feet. I noticed that the lady was scraping his foot really hard, something like how you would de-skin a potato.. and next thing I knew, blood was oozing out. =( poor pb! And on hindsight we really shouldn't have done that cos i don't think they really sanitize their tools and we could have contracted some disease or something.. kinda scary.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

With our flight at 4pm, we had a morning to settle any odds and ends. Realized that we had not bought much stuff so we thought we'd go get some coffee powder and the cute vietnamese coffee filters from ben thanh market.

But of course, we had to stop by Pho2000 again for a very satisfying breakfast. Our last Pho Bo and spring rolls for the trip!

Ben Thanh market is just next door so we popped by




bought lots of overpriced coffee from this lady.


would you dare to drink this?


back at oscar saigon, we checked out and hung around waiting for time to go by


google vietnam!


hailed a cab. noticed that all the cab drivers have an iced coffee!


halong bay vs merlion


the hcmc airport is really new, clean and efficient, more so than changi airport i dare say

back in Singapore, after getting on the cab, I was in for a reverse culture shock. First the taxi driver on the right. Next, the empty and orderly roads with mostly cars instead of being covered with motorbikes.. and I realized how i had grown accustomed to the busy roads of Vietnam in just 4 days.

the fairy water puppet

Friday, April 11, 2008

ok this is almost out of point but, 2 days after, missing vietnamese food so much, we decided to go get some in Singapore. We went to Pho Hoa in Suntec. Ok I've actually tried this before going to vietnam and i found it to be really good. So nevermind that there were only like, 3 couples in the entire restaurant on a friday night, let's try it again.

The noodles weren't cooked enough, the soup wasn't flavourful. even the bloody coffee wasn't fragrant. I don't know if my expectations have gone up after visiting vietnam, but it was really disappointing. Think i'll visit the holland v branch, and other vietnamese restaurants to check out their food next.