Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I guess I forgot to blog about my new nephew, since it all happened so fast.

My sister was due to give birth at the end of August. It happened instead at the start of July.

Jack Hamilton Lewis was born (8 weeks early) on July 3rd, 2004. He was a little under 5lbs. My brother in law (who is significantly larger than anyone in my family) suggested there wasn’t enough room inside for him anymore.

So, he was a bit early, lungs not quite ready yet, and was flown to Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. Where he stayed for a couple of weeks, before returning to Warrnambool, and then Hamilton. No-one was expecting him to be ready to go home until about his original due date, but he’s home now, and doing well.

Jaq & I (yes, it seems he was named after her!) raced over to Melbourne to see them, and he looks just like Dad!

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Funniest thing I’ve seen. Ever.

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Just surfing around, I found this site. Some guy has set up his computer so that you can choose songs to cue up on his system.

I might just have to try something similar with my Xbox…

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Exporting Artwork

Seeing as how XBMC won’t read the id3 tags from AAC files, I had to grab the artwork from each album and place it in a file (folder.jpg/folder.png) inside the album folder. This was actually easier with Windows (aargh!), since iTunes for Windows exports album art as BMP files, which can then be processed. Still, it took me most of the afternoon to do that by hand.

I had had a bash at doing it with an AppleScript, but could not work out how to get the data from a <<class PNG/JPEG *>> structure into an image file. Until I came across a script that does that. It was then a trivial matter to make it so that it worked for multiple files, and only processed those files it needed to, and ignored those without artwork.

Tip: iTunes will give you an Out Of Memory Error if you try to get the data from a song that has no artworks! (Took me a while to figure this out!)

So, the finished script can be found below. I optimised it a bit, but it still takes a while to run, especially if you run it on lots of tracks. Since it’s not something you’ll want to run every day, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Exporting Playlists

I also thought it would be neat to get the playlists I use in iTunes (I use mostly smart playlists, such as 50’s - 00’s Music, Not Played Today, Recently Added and so on), and use them on XBMC. So, I wrote a script that does this, and then ftp’s the resulting files to the xbox.

You will need to edit the first few lines: it should be obvious what needs to go where.

Anyway, you can download Export Artwork and Export Playlists. You can also download Bracket Change, a small script that swaps the round & square brackets in a track name. (Right-click and choose to download them, else they will just open in your browser window).

All of these files should go into ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts (User only) or /Library/iTunes/Scripts (System-wide) for best effect.

Note: The first Script is no longer required, since more recent builds of XBMC can handle the data from AAC files.

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I typed schinckel.blogpsot.com into my browser, wanting to check out the links I had made, but got the address wrong. Have a look - it’s funny if you look at my post a little while ago. I thought some vengeful god was hacking me.

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It’s ironic, how disorganised I am, because I love to organise things.

For instance, I have had a ball importing all of my CDs (okay, not all of them, yet) into iTunes, then finding all of the cover art (or eventually, scanning it so it was of a suitable quality), and making sure all of the tags were good. Then re-importing them as AAC files because they are smaller (and better quality) than MP3. Then getting all of the cases out for the fourth time to change the year of most songs, especially if they came from a compilation CD.

Then I discovered iPhoto, and have since been importing all of my digital images into that, and organising them. Eventually, I’ll scan all of my old photos, and add them in. And check all of the dates (luckily, most of my photos are APS/Advantix, so they have a date associated with them!).

Even more recently (let’s be honest, importing the digital photos didn’t take that long. The scanning of the old photos will) I discovered Books, an OSX program that acts as a repository for storing info about your paper library. And I have a fairly large library. I build a custom bookshelf in my study (two walls worth) and have filled it up. The great feature about Books, other than it is free is that it can do an on-line search for books according to the ISBN of the book. Even better, it can handle barcode inputs, not that I have a barcode scanner. But it’s fun typing in the number, and letting Amazon.com give me the data.

What’s really fun is seeing how many of my old books (most of my library comes from 2nd hand stores, and I don’t ever throw out or sell a book. I don’t even like to lend them out) are in the Amazon database. My earliest successes so far include some vintage Frank Herbert (e.g., The Santaroga Barrier, April 1971, ISBN 0-450-00823-1). The funniest thing I have found is a book without an ISBN: Hulme, H.R., (1969) Nuclear Fusion, Wykeham Publications, London. Not sure if it pre-dates ISBNs, or this publisher just didn’t get one for this series (The Wykeham Science Series: For schools and universities).

Well, back to entering ISBNs.

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After all of the mucking around with getting an AppleScript to work, and then using python anyway, I discovered a far faster method of adding tracks to iTunes: just drag the folder they all live in, and iTunes will only add the songs that aren’t in the Library yet!

Probably well documented, but I didn’t find it!

What you may need to do, particularly if multiple people need to be able to change MP3 Tags or artwork, is do the following:

• Change the owner/group of the files to something that all people can access - I use shared/admin, since all non-admin users are scum, and do not need to be able to change stuff.
• Change the protection bits of the files to allow owner R+W, group R+W, all R.

Code to do this should be easy:

find ~shared/Music -name *.m* -not -perm 664 -exec chmod 664 {};

find ~shared/Music -name *.m* -not -owner shared -exec chown shared:admin {};

But bash interprets the ; itself, and gives the following error:
find: -exec: no terminating ";"
Bitch. Can’t be bothered figuring out how to use another shell, so knock up a script in python: UpdateShared.py

This script also updates the owner/group and permissions for files in ~shared/Movies and ~shared/iPhotoLibrary.

Update: the ; must be \; for the bash commands to work.

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