Free Candy For Everyone

I have a reasonably large music collection, probably around 35 gigs. I really like listening to music while I work, so I like to keep my most up-to-date music library at work. This is the iTunes I sync my iPhone to and the one that has all my song ratings and the play counts from my years at the job.

Unfortunately, I changed jobs recently and risked losing all my play count and ratings info. I’d tried to keep copies of all new songs I got on both my work machine and my home machine, but it was hard to be sure what was missing on one machine or the other. And come on, the play count info! Also, I had lots of playlists I wouldn’t want to lose on my work copy of iTunes. And the way iTunes stores playlists provides no simple import/export functionality.

I started at a new job in December and imported a backup of my home iTunes library from 2007. I was missing all the music I’d added since then, I was missing all my ratings and play count info. For a while I’d been wanting to write a tool to sync info from multiple iTunes libraries. The implosion of my gadgets over my vacation left me with some time on my hands, so I decided it was time to write this program.

Introducing iTunesLibraryEdit. It’s a Windows only program written in C#, which means you might need to have the .NET Framework installed, if it doesn’t work.

Features:

• Compare your local iTunes library with any iTunes Music Library.xml file
• Display songs in your local library not in the remote one, and songs in the remote library not available locally
• Copy local songs not in a remote library to a folder for easy isolation and transfer to a removable drive
• Copy ratings, play count and playlists from remote library to local iTunes with live updating of iTunes

So far I’ve only tried it on Vista. I’ll be bringing it to work tomorrow to update my work library and make sure that it works on XP as well. Hope someone else enjoys this, I had a lot of fun writing it and learned a bunch about C#.

Note: You have to manually copy the iTunes Music Library.xml file to the other machine for comparisons. I don’t do any crazy interweb magic. You can usually find this file in your user music folder, something like c:\Documents and Settings\Tara\My Music\iTunes

I just finished watching the movie Once and it was amazing. I’d read some reviews and best of lists from last year that included this movie, but had not managed to get around to watching it yet. But whoa, is it impactful.

It’s a simple story of two musicians who find each other and make music. And the music is fantastic. The lead characters are played by musicians, not actors. Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová are both musicians, they actually wrote all the music in the movie. Large portions of the movie are watching them sing and figure out their music together, so if you don’t find the emotional connection in watching people sing, be warned, this movie is not for you.

But it was so much for me. I think I cried through almost every song. They were just so potent, so poignant. I’m in need of buying the soundtrack and buying it now. There was something about these songs that really hit me and hard (though I’ve been a bit emotional recently, so take that into account).

I’ve embedded a video of one of the songs, but not with movie footage because you should catch the whole thing and see it in context to really appreciate it. The camera work is a bit dodgy, but the performance is great.

I’ve been using Last.fm to track my listening habits for a couple of years now. I’ve written about it several times on the site, but if you don’t know what it is, the idea is it’s a streaming music radio station that tracks what you listen to and recommends music. But it also has plugins for iTunes and the like so it can always watch what you are listening to. Yay, this let’s me see pretty charts of my listening habits! Awesome. Check out my page to see some charts and stuff.

Well, Binary Bonsai had a post up about a site that creates beautiful graphs of your listening habits. I loved it so much I had to just re-blog it. Pretty graphs make me happy (this is probably one reason I’m a programmer, I like orderly things. I like data!).

Check out LastGraph if you have your very own Last.fm account. You’ll quickly be looking at awesome graphs yourself!

P.S. The aesthetics remind me of the Baby Name Voyager, an awesome applet that let’s you see the popularity of names over time in the US.

Amen, I say, amen to that.

[Via Binary Bonsai]

When writing my post of top time wasters I forgot one of them - Facebook. Facebook, you say? Yeah, the social networking site/application platform. With applications like iLike, I can lose way too much time. iLike is a music site, it integrates with the favorites artists you have listed on Facebook to tell you about upcoming concerts by your favorite bands. You can also use it to embed music in your profile. But my favorite way to waste time with it is the music quiz. It’s basically name-that-tune. They play a clip and you have to identify the artist or the song title. The quicker you respond, the more points you get. I like trying to answer as quickly as possible so my average response time is really low. It’s great fun and somehow I managed to just sit there listening, listening for quite some time.

Every time I go over to MySpace I cringe at the loud busy pages. But Facebook is so slimmed down. And it has great apps like Vampires vs. Werewolves that let’s you bite your friends, and Flixster that let’s you rate and review movies. It has a cool little Movie Compatibility Test that let’s you see how much like your friends your music tastes are.

And that’s enough about Facebook. I think I’ve written 3 posts about how fun it is. That’s enough. It’s not all that much fun, but it is a nice way to waste a few minutes here and there.