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. 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:
Get it here.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:
- id3 tags and file name itself have to be named properly
- Better still if there's album information, year information and album art. Pretty!
- All File Names Have To Start With A Capital Letter
- 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'
- Chinese songs must also be in chinese (unicode of course)
- Chinese artists, if they have an english name, must have it spelled: 'Ocean 欧得洋'
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Select Options | Preferences
- Choose Plug-ins | Output in the treeview on the left
- Select 'Nullsoft Disk Writer' and click 'Configure' button
- Select the directory to save your .wav file to and click OK
- Close the 'Winamp Preferences' dialog
- Select File | Add Media to Library... and add whatever .flac files you want to convert
- With the .flac files in your winamp library, press play
- All the 'played' .flac files will be converted to .wav files stored in the directory specified
- Now remember to switch your Output back to 'Nullsoft Direct Sound Output' so that you can actually play songs in the future.
- Import the newly created .wav files
- iTunes will convert them to .mp3s!
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.
Just open them in iTunes, right click and select 'Convert Selection to MP3'. Duh. Why am I even writing this.
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