iTunes Grief Part 2

 Music/Audio  No Responses »
Jan 132008
 

I finally figured out how to do what I wanted (with regards to finding songs that do not have files).  Here is a step by step instruction guide (mostly so that the next time I run in to this problem I won’t have to “reinvent the wheel.”)

  1. Create a normal (non-smart or manual playlist) play list (CTRL-N), name it “M-All Songs” (that’s short on my playlist naming convention for “management playlist – All Songs”, I normally don’t play the management playlists, they’re just used for managing my iTunes library.)
  2. Go to “Music” and select all (CTRL-A) music, now drag these songs in to the manual playlist you created above (M-All Songs).  Note: Due to a quirk in the way that iTunes is programmed, iTunes will not permit you to drag songs missing files in to a manual playlist.  Imagine that.
  3. Create a smart playlist (CTRL-ALT-N), name it “M-All songs missing files.”  Configure the smart playlist as follows: 
    1. Check “Match” all “of the following rules:”, and set the drop down to “all.”
    2. “Playlist” is not “M-All Songs”
    3. “Genre” is not “Podcast”, this will remove podcasts which might show up here.  If you are like me, you uncheck the podcasts you wish to keep rather than deleting them so that they will not be copied to your iPod.  This will make sure that you’re not shown any podcast entries that are unchecked (since they would not have been copied in to M-All Songs).  Alternately, you can just check “Match only checked items.”
    4. Check “Live updating”
  4. Go to your new smart playlist “M-All songs missing files” and find the files or delete as required.

Keywords: iTunes, find duplicate files, delete duplicate files, iTunes playlists, delete missing files without plugin.

Keywords provided in case someone decides to google for the solution to the same problem I was having.  Hopefully my page will be found and help some other poor shmo who was suckered in to buying an Apple product.  (BTW Apple, you suck.  At least Microsoft would have provided me a way of backing up my database without needing 12 DVDR disks to backup the entire bloody music library just to get the configuration data.)

 Posted by John Williams at 3:17 pm

Notepad: Finding all of your MP? (mp3, mp4, mpg, etc.) on your HDD

 CMD, Work  No Responses »
Jan 122008
 

dir /ogen /a-d /b /s “*.mp?” >find_mp.txt

dir /? will tell you what all of these do, so I’m not going to bother to explain.

 Posted by John Williams at 4:20 pm

The Archive

 Personal  2 Responses »
Jan 122008
 

In cleaning my house and purging it of various bits and pieces I tend to come across a few things that I want to save, some are just “I want to save the idea” and others are “I want to save the item.”  This is one of those “I want to save the idea.”

Sadly, as the item departs my house, a bit of nostalgia echos through me at it’s loss, but Cognitive Dissonance remains a well documented concept and even well studied.

Cognitive Dissonance is the discomfort one feels at trying to reconcile two contradictory thoughts (cognitions) or in engaging in behavior that conflicts with ones beliefs.  Some have even said that no brainwashed individual has ever been aware of his/her brainwashed condition and when presented with truth, “cognitive dissonance” comes into play.  The brainwashed individual will dismiss truth as far-fetched, outlandish, impossible and even absurd.  To accept it the individual would have to fit the new information into his/her present world view, which would require a dramatic reorientation of her/her mental processes.  It is much easier to simply dismiss the new information as unreliable, unproven, unauthoritive, conjecture, opinion, etc.

It’s a theory that has made me think over the years that I cannot simply dismiss information presented to me because it doesn’t fit comfortably in to the world as I know it.  That the world is larger and grander than I could ever imagine, and that I must constantly question the basis of my beliefs.

In this way, I hope to realize when previous beliefs no longer hold against conflicting evidence and I am ready to change, while others might become “stuck in a rut” and “set in their ways,” I remain agile and flexible to the changing environment of the world.

 Posted by John Williams at 2:46 pm

Finally, evidence of a higher power…

 Music/Audio  No Responses »
Jan 122008
 

The EMI is looking to restructure their spending, because it seems some people have come to the realization that the RIAA just doesn’t work in this digital age of MP3s and music downloads.  This very well could lead to the downfall of the RIAA and an end to the senseless prosecution of violations against the DMCA while the major record labels simultaneously relent and offer their inventory in non-DRM formats (MP3) instead of pushing DRM down the throats of the consumer.

The market has spoken.  I hope this goes from rumor to reality and if so I could not be happier with the end results.

 Posted by John Williams at 10:54 am

iTunes Grief

 Personal  No Responses »
Jan 112008
 

iTunes 7 is woefully lacking in library management tools.

For some obscure reason after the regular Windows Update procedure (Windows rebooted to install a security patch), iTunes launches and starts indexing my entire storage capacity.  Unfortunately (at least in this case) my third HDD which I use for data redundancy (since my new PC is a gaming rig with RAID 0, which means no redundancy at all, so the second drive is a non-redundant/non-RAID drive that I use solely for data… I use a third drive to mirror the second…)

 Anyway, the point is that my third drive had a duplicate of my entire music library and iTunes indexed them all and added them.  So, after many duplicates (triplicates and more), I ended up having over 9000 songs in there when I normally have only about 2000…  It must have done this more than once while I wasn’t watching.

And wouldn’t you know it, iTunes has no tools to help you easily find and remove duplicates.  The View Duplicates feature has no intelligence, which makes it virtually useless for pruning out 6000+ duplicate records.

On the positive side, it did finally import all of the music on my data drive that I’ve been planning to eventually import…  now I just have to figure out which segments are damaged and should be deleted and rate the rest.

If only I could remember this trick I found once that involved creating a couple of playlists and then using a smart playlist to help you quickly identify all music that was orphaned…  (that is, without a file)..  I just turned off the 3rd HDD and used an iTunes plugin to find all of the missing files and then remove them from the database.  That saved me weeks of click… click… click… which is how Apple would have me do it…

Many months later…

 Posted by John Williams at 7:23 pm

Building Wikis

 WebDev  No Responses »
Jan 102008
 

I’m building a number of wikis lately for professional and personal projects.  It’s quite fun, but it’s a ton of work.  If you happen to find yourself interested in the books by CJ Cherryh, you should check out the Cherryh Wiki a community of fans are putting together, led by yours truly.

 Posted by John Williams at 3:20 pm

Programming Advice

 Personal  No Responses »
Jan 092008
 

http://xhtml-css.com/blog/7-top-advises-to-program-like-a-master

English is clearly not his first language (he admits it’s his fourth in the article) but he has some excellent suggestions..  Now if only I could figure out how to deploy a versioning control system..  I’ve been spending hours and hours lately cleaning the house and throwing away things that I’ve not looked at in years, and going through files I’ve not looked at in years and trying to tame the duplication creep that has entered in to my file library.

The bad habit of just dumping a bunch of files on to my file storage drive for later sorting has gotten out of hand.  I have more than 4 years of accumulated files, including at least 3-4 duplicates of some files.  In the last 4 days I’ve deleted more than 4 GB of duplicate files.  If I had a VCS I could just let it control the versions on 99% of the files that I have.  What would be even cooler is if the VCS allowed me to version control binary files…

ahh, imagination…

So now begins my attempt to reorganize everything.

  1. Got a text editor years ago..  TextPad is my friend.
  2. Need VCS
  3. I have my snippet library farm (many links) and google is invaluable
  4. Keep a to do list.  These are my todo lists
  5. Refer to a limited library when learning something new (don’t overwhelm yourself)..  I have books on PHP, SQL, encryption, vbscript, ASP, and more.
  6. Do something (make progress even in small ways)
  7. Take time for life hobbies, check… work, check… friends, check… girlfriend, check.

 Posted by John Williams at 9:29 am

Upgrade To Do List

 WebDev  No Responses »
Jan 082008
 

With a newer version of phpbb3 and wordpress released, the time has arrived to start evaluating what it takes to perform an upgrade.

Here is a todo list which I will try to keep up to date (since some of you visitors actually care about the upgrade to the phpbb forums)

  1. Backup and remove all remnants of the MCA forums/dkp/calendar from the website. … Completed 09JAN2008
  2. Backup and drop all MySQL tables related to the MCA forums/dkp/calendar.  Completed 07JAN2008.
  3. Review upgrade instructions for phpbb3 … partially completed
  4. Review upgrade instructions for wordpress 2.3 … in progress
  5. Review wordpress/phpbb3 integration and determine replacement integration method … currently looking at http://www.wp-united.com/ as a replacement to the previous phpbb integration.
  6. Review post levels plugin for wordpress 2.1 and determine how to replicate security with wordpress 2.3 … this is the devil item that is holding everything up
  7. perform upgrade on phpbb
  8. perform upgrade on wordpress
  9. integrate phpbb-wordpress
  10. re-apply post-levels plugin to wordpress to secure private posts, or delete private posts

Next, I’m looking at continuing some of my previous coding endeavors…  more on that later.

 Posted by John Williams at 9:27 am

Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

 TV & Movies  No Responses »
Jan 072008
 

Sweeny Todd is perhaps the most graphic movie I have been to in years.  I did not expect it from Tim Burton who has often done dark and even creepy movies, but morbid?  No.  This movie is rank of graphic murder, complete with robust arterial spray and cannibalism.

You want to like Sweeny Todd, played by Johnny Depp, from the moment the movie starts.  Johnny Depp was one of the boy actors who, then 24, starred in “21 Jump Street” as an upstanding law enforcement officer. It even swings frequently from brooding and Gothic movie to light hearted musical from time to time (and Johnny Depp surprises with a passable singing voice).  His character, Benjamin Barker aka Sweeny Todd, has been wrongly accused and punished by a covetous and falsely-pious judge of London.  Now, 14 years later after having returned from his wrongful deportation to Australia, he seeks revenge and with the help of budding cannibal Mrs Lovett (played by psycho-vixen Helena Bohem Carter, veteran of movies such as Fight Club and Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, and the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.)

If you have a squeemish stomach you are warned that after he fails to kill the crooked judge, you should close your eyes any time you see Sweeny Todd brandishing his shaving knives in his parlor.  Failure to do so will result in your memory being coated with as much gore as Sweeny is when covered in arterial spray from whichever hapless victim wandered in to his lair.  And thus begins the conversion of an otherwise tragic victim to a full scale psychopath.  Meanwhile, to pay the debts of the meat shop and dispose of the evidence, Mrs Lovett has decided to cook the victims in to her meat pies.  Soon she has customers lined up to try her exotic new meat recipes.

Were it not for the graphic nature of the movie I would have happily rated this movie a 5.  It not only stretches Depp and Carter beyond the roles that I’ve previously seen them play (because it’s a musical), but the movie has an excellent supporting cast in the persons of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall (both have played characters in the Harry Potter movies), as well as brief appearances from Anthony Head (played Giles in the Buffer the Vampire Slayer TV series).

Taking in to account the frequent need to avert my eyes and the effect the arterial spray and strong elements of cannibalism within the movie, I have to knock 2 points off it for a round 3.  Granted it’s a personal preference scale and might deserve better from a less biased critic, but that’s my opinion and I warn you that seeing this movie may leave you with a strong desire to not consider what goes in to your meat pies, peparoni and sausages.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:50 am

Backups on a Budget

 Work  No Responses »
Jan 062008
 

One of my favorite tools when working at my last job (besides vbscript and cmd batch) was robocopy.  It’s included in the Windows Server Resource Kit.  We used it for all sorts of things, from getting a difference log between two directories to mirroring one computers files to another.

Although my last job wasn’t dirt poor and in need of a budget backup method, I’ve seen a few companies working at my present job that worked hard to do more with less.  One of the innovative ideas that I saw was the use of an external USB drive for backups.  They use Windows Backup to perform a complete system backup to a file located on the USB drive.  There are several potential problems with this method which I won’t go in to…  but one of the ideas that occured to me while reviewing their set up that I do want to propose is…

If you have a file server (and I have an older USB drive stocked full of various media I’ve collected over the years, from technical information to source code I’ve written, to backups of my website) you can get a mirror image of your file server data by using robocopy to mirror the data on your file server to the USB drive.

You could easily rotate USB drives for off-site redundancy, and with 1 TB USB drives being in the 500$ range, you could get 2 years (roughly) worth of life out of the USB drive performing backups for multiple systems (robocopy works over the network, and you could perform net use commands in a cmd batch file to create mapped drives and remove them for the purposes of backups.)  Assuming the average computer is 80-150 GB of data (let us 150 GB for the purposes of math), you could store 6 fully loaded computers on your USB drive.  If it’s 80 GB per computer, you could store 12 fully loaded computers.  If you average less than 30 GB per computer, you could store 33 computers on your 1 TB USB drive.

 Posted by John Williams at 10:08 pm

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