I spent a little time this weekend figuring out best practices for tagging MP3 files for online-distribution. I was hoping to find an article online, but didn’t come across anything great. 43folders has some great general tips in “Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make”:http://www.43folders.com/2004/12/five_mistakes_b.html, but they don’t go beyond the important but obvious tip to fill in every tag field you possibly can.

So, instead I’ve done some independent research, which I’ll be compiling in this article.

First off, not everyone is using the same media player on your desktop. iTunes is popular, WinAmp is well entrenched, Windows Media Player is bundled with Windows, and Real Player and MusicMatch can’t be ruled out. For the time being though, I’m focusing on iTunes, WinAmp and Windows Media Player.

Recent versions of all three support the ID3v2 tagging standard, but not identically. WinAmp has a field for URLs that iTunes lacks. Windows Media Player supports the addition of 3 different URL types, plus additional user defined URLs, but doesn’t seem to do anything with them in the UI.

When it comes right down to it, the one item supported on all three is the comments field, but they don’t all handle it consistently. iTunes will only display 254 characters of this field, even if more are available in the file. WinAmp and WinMP will support many more (though I didn’t nail down how many more). Adding to the confusion, each package has different display charactaristics for the field.

iTunes displays 4 lines of ~80 characters without scrolling. WinAmp shows 3 lines of 35 characters without scrolling, and WinMP shows 11 lines of ~37 characters without scrolling.

My advice is to keep the whole comment under 254 characters, to make sure the URL fits within the first 4 lines on iTunes, and to make sure that the most important info fits in the 3 lines available in WinAmps tag viewer/editor. This may result in the URL not showing in WinAmp, but that’s fine, as long as you fill in the URL field too.

Lastly, go through the files in WinAmp and edit the comment in the ID3v1 section, which is all users with older media players will see. This is limited to 30 characters, so put your URL there. Leave the http:// and the www off if you have to.

Note:This entry, unfortunately, is a little incomplete. I haven’t gotten around to updating it with suggestions like being sure to add a bitmap of your URL to any embedded image files so that people will see it who might not check the comment tags, that, and other stuff I’m sure I’ll do a better job of remembering when I’m better rested.

Another Note:If you have punctuation in your song titles, album title or band name, strip it out of your filenames before you post them. Commas, quotes, apostrophes, colons, exclamation points and the like can cause all sorts of problems. In our case we had to redo all the downloads and get people to seed the new torrents because commas in the properly punctuated name of the first track (“Wine, Women, and Song”) caused some Zip programs to fail to unpack it, compromising the integrity of the album.

Appearantly Microsoft has just announced that -Copeland-, um, I mean -longhorn-, no, wait, Vista! Thats it!.

Microsoft has just announced that Vista is going to come in 7 different versions. This is up from the already absurd 5.5 versions of Windows XP (somehow, I can’t count their crippled version for emerging markets as a full version).

One of the things that OpenSource has going for it is simplicity. You know you are going to get all the features, no need to consult some crazy comparison matrix to make sure you are picking the right version to get all the features you want/need.

Of course, this doesn’t really work for Microsoft, because it doesn’t let them maximize their profit, so they come up with 3 different “business” versions of windows, a couple different home versions and an Ultimate version in the hope that everyone will just give up in frustration and shell out for the most expensive version so that they can get on with their lives.

I guess we’ll see how it works for them, but it seems to me that this should be the time for Microsoft to be delighting their users, by making Microsoft software easy for them, by making them feel like they are getting a deal. Instead, they are making their users life difficult before they even start using the new version of their software, and they are making them feel like they are paying for each and every feature of the software, rather than getting a bargain.

Apple and Linux are looking better and better.

Today seems to be the day for me to run across posts linking to “asian”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolelee/3778152/ “girls”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisachau/42762416/ modelling OpenSource CMS advocacy t-shirts.

Thawed ~1.5 cups of frozen roasted sweet Corn from Trader Joes, and a similar amount of Foster Farms frozen precooked roasted chicken breast from Costco.

In the meantime I cut coarse slices of 1/4 a yellow onion and sauteed it in olive oil with two minced garlic cloves. Minced and added a couple of tablespoons of fire roasted peppers (also from Trader Joes), and a couple of tablespoons of “Tomato Magic” (tomato puree thickened with tomato paste) from PFI.

Added the thawed corn and chicken to the frying pan and mixed.

Added a pinch of oregano, a pinch of ground cumin, and a hint of ground cayenne. Salted to taste.

Prep time: ~10 minutes.

Consumed. Delicious.

I kind of hate myself for doing this, but here it goes:

Chief Justice William Rhenquist has died. This leaves Bush with two vacancies to fill. So, what happens to Roberts, who some suspected might be positioned to succeed Rhenquist as Chief Justice, and is Bush going to have any chance of shoving two right-wing activists onto the bench at a time when his approval ratings are sinking even lower?

(Ok, so not cold blooded or calculating at all. That was the plan when I was writing the title, but after that, I didn’t have much energy for anything but what you see above).

I’m not Christian, religious, or even very spiritual. It’s not that I disagree with what I think I understand of Christian teaching, I don’t. It’s not that I don’t see that being open to something bigger than ones self can be a source of strength and comfort. It’s just that I’m no quite as forgiving of human frailty as I need to be to accept the hypocrisy that seems to swirl around any congregation.

With this background, I may not have the credibility to say what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway.

If George Bush were a Christian leader, as he seems to fashion himself, he’d be down on his knees, in front of God and man, begging for forgiveness for himself and his nation for abandoning its poor and sick to the devastation that hit New Orleans.

Instead, he’s up there, smug and proud, trying to act like he’s on top of something that is so much bigger than himself.