Haxxor!!!

I use MediaMonkey to play my music. I love it. It roxxorz. I give it 3 sneezes.

We (the wife and I) are currently listening through the Lord of the Rings trilogy in audiobook format. Due to the length of the chapters, the cds are broken up into 3-minute tracks. This means I have a LOT of LOTR mp3s in my music library. So [begin geekery] I wrote a custom playlist in MediaMonkey which grabs all of my LOTR tracks that have a play count of 0, and sorts them so that the beginning of the playlist will always be the first track we haven't listened to. It's like an automatic bookmark.

Then, I decided to update the tags and filenames of my LOTR tracks. At which point, MediaMonkey lost its database info for all of the LOTR tracks (presumably because it's associated by filename), setting the playcounts for all of the tracks back to 0. Which meant that unless I wanted to let MM play through all of the tracks we had already listened to (something like 6 hours of them) those tracks would always be sitting at the top of my playlist. Grrr!

So I did some lurnin' on the interwebs, and discovered that MM's database is stored in SQLite format. I downloaded SQLiteMan, and used it to hack my database, setting the playcount for the older tracks to 1, and solving my own problem. [/geekery]

Yay! Now I have geekhigh!

WinMorph, Haiku, and a couple of Palindromes

1) WinMorph:

I was recently introduced by Timothy to a program called WinMorph. You know how you see those videos people have done where you take two pictures and you morph from one picture into the other? Yeah, it does that. So far I've done two of the chids morphing in us, the parents. 3 Sneezes

2) Haiku:

I'm still working on winning the ThinkGeek Monthly Haiku Contest. I have a plan, but I don't want to reveal it too soon, otherwise someone smarter than me might work it out first.

3) Palindromes:

While waiting for some progress bars during the past few days, I came up with a couple more that I'm proud enough of to publish:
- Ned I am, anon a maiden.
- 'Tis but an Irish sir in a tub. Sit.
- 'Nam-era webcam in an iMac. Beware, man!

A brief Wizard Wednesday, and a preview

Over the past couple of years, I have been on a constant search for a music player. In my experience of music players since 1998, I have sampled the gamut, everything from the Linux-only Amarok, past Apple's inescaple iTunes, and into the obscure open source programs such as MusikCube.

Without a doubt, my favorite music player has been the previously mentioned Amarok, but the Linux-onliness of it interferes with the fact that I am thus far required to run Windows on my work PC.

iTunes has its upsides, but there are just a few too many maladjusted features which stem from the fact that it is the proprietary spawn of sata- err... where was I? Oh, right. Here are the criteria I have come up with for a media player to suit my needs:

- Must support the full gamut of audio codecs: Mp3 (duh), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (I haven't used it yet, but I may want to some day) &c.
- Must allow for the maintenance and convenience of a media library. I remember the day when the standard mp3 collection was small enough that you just had a music folder you dumped everything in to, and when you wanted to listen to something you would drag and drop from Explorer into the playlist window. No more!
- A slew of features is nice, but more importantly, I want to be able to remove features I don't want to use. In otherwords, it should be basically an mp3 player, with a bunch of plug-in support for everything else.
- Customizable layout - I want to be able to arrange things so that the player window/pane goes here, the playlist pane goes here, the equlizer sits here, the media library is there, etc.
- It must be free. Now, there is free as in beer, and there is free as in Braveheart. In this case, I care more about the beerish 'freeness' than about Braveheartian 'freedom'. In other words, it needs to not cost anything to me, and that's more important than it being open source.
- It needs to run on Windows. If I had the liberty to run Linux, no doubt I would be running Amarok, since it truly is the best media player I have sampled.

After having sampled - as I said - a whole slew of players, I have settled once again on Winamp. Ah, Winamp! You won my love back in the 90s, lost it toward the early 'aughts', and I have once again returned to you!

Winamp combines the best of all of the above. It comes with more features than you can (or would want to) shake a stick at, but it also comes with the ability to uninstall pretty much everything that is attached to it. I recently downloaded and installed the latest version (5.something.something) and was dismayed with all the clutter in the media library. But I opened the preferences, and went to the plugins section, and low and behold, there they all were, and within 5 minutes I had it stripped back down to a nice, tight, slim little player.

The layout customization of Winamp is wonderful. Every section has its own window, which can be completely and independently moved around. If you want to, you can lock the windows together to create one big glom of media stuff, or you can detach them and organize them all seperately.

The default set of plugins supports all the codecs I care about (primarily mp3 and ogg) with additional plugins available for anything you might be missing.

And, Winamp basic (which is anything BUT) is free as in Beer! Yes, if you really want to, you can upgrade to Winamp Pro, but I'm at a loss for what features it might incorporate that aren't available either by default or as plugins.

It even incorporates global hotkeys, which allow me to start, stop, fast forward, rewind, and do just about anything else I want to from any application or window in Windows.

So congratulations, Winamp. I hereby award you a 3 Sneeze rating in the category of media players! You can pickup your plaque at the back of the auditorium.


COMING SOON:
I've been having ideas for a series of posts about the Fruits of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:22) rattling around in my head for the past week or so. Hopefully, if I put something here about how I'm going to post them, it'll actually get done ("He intoned the magic words 'Ala Kazaam!' and waved his arms in a big circle, and the spell was complete").