Schinckel.net

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 built 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.

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.