foobar2000
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Software
Of late I’ve been keeping busy experimenting with foobar2000, an extremely functional music player for Windows. In the process of converting over to foobar from Windows Media Player I also ended up doing a little of re-structuring my music collection.
In the past I had all my music sorted via:
- Music \ [Artist] \ [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
But since I decided to finally incorporate all the Hindi music I have with the English music I realized I had to change things a little. Doing so meant I could also include all the music that I’ve collected as single songs, and not part of an album. In addition to what I already had I also developed an ear for classical music around the time I started using foobar, so I ended up with a structure inside my Music folder like so:
- [Folder] \ [Artist] \ [Year] [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
- Where “Folder” is one of the following six folders, and “##” is the track number.
- \Artists
- All my english music that I have in complete albums falls into this category except for soundtrack releases.
- \Classical
- The Beethoven’s, and Tchaikovsky’s of this world rest within.
- \Hindi
- All my Hindi music, even though the majority of it is all movie soundtracks.
- \Playlists
- Foobar has built in dynamic playlist support, but occasionally it is useful to save a hard (soft?) copy of a playlist.
- \Single Tracks
- All the singles of my youth, I’ve had some of these files for 5 or so years.
- \Soundtracks
- Black Hawk Down, Mary Poppins, Metal Gear Solid, Pirates of the Caribbean, Phantom of the Opera…the list goes on and on.
One of the many things that make me “as happy as a pig in shit”, is the ability to browse my library via “facets”, a dynamic list that sorts using AND and/or OR logic in a hierarchal manner. It’s one of those times when a picture does indeed say a thousand words.
Thanks to Frank Bicking for his work developing the Facets component.
I’m sure I’ll write more on foobar in the future.
Opera 9.5
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
Damn right, and about time!
The stable version of 9.5 is alive and kicking.
Get it here.
Partial Changelog:
- Introduced Opera Link.
- Added Quick Find, an improved full text history search tool.
- Introduced the Speed Dial.
- Introduced a new default skin.
For more information about Opera, please spend 2 min and read their overview.
It’s definitely worth the time to check Opera out, it might just change your life…
…Or at least your online one ;)
Final Countdown
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
It’s here.
The day is finally upon us.
Oh, and incidentally, BSG season 4 is doing well. It’s right up there with the second half of House’s season 4 which has also started airing.
Now I’m just awaiting Heroes and Prison Break to resume.
A review of Mojo, an iTunes library sharing software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Review, Software
A little over a year ago, I bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS, or the “Slug” as it was called, in order to hook up an external hard drive and share my MP3 collection off of it using Apple’s DAAP. It went well, but as I rarely needed my MP3 collection when I was out of the house it ended up being one of those “because I can” things and I returned the Slug.
In a nutshell the procedure went like this:
- Local machine:
- Install DAAP server
- Install SSH server
- Setup SSH key files (as opposed to passwords)
- Setup port tunneling using SSH
- Remote Machine:
- Install iTunes (unfortunately the best DAAP client at the time)
- Install SSH client
- Setup port tunneling through the the SSH client
- Attach the SSH key file to make it auto login (or not, depending on security)
- SSH into the server, and Voila!
So, if you’re still with me you can tell that is requires a bit of work, and is definitely not easy and intuitive to setup.
Fast forward to the year 2008 and “Mojo is here“.
Mojo accomplishes everything outlined above with one small intuitive little client, it actually goes above and beyond as its list of features include; zero configuration, instant download capability, and playlist synchronization.
It still relies on iTunes though unfortunately.
As of release 2.5.1, Mojo is offered as free software, with its only limitation on the number of peers in your friends list. Alternatively, for the small price of $10.95, you can upgrade to Mojo Pro, which currently gives you three licenses, and lifetime upgrade membership.
The only thing really souring the deal for me is its mac only status and iTunes dependency, but I believe there is a windows version in the works. And as for the iTunes/DAAP dependency, well I’ll have to wait till Mojo starts supporting WMP/UPNP.
Tags: apple, daap, itunes, Media, mojo, network, p2p, Review, Software, ssh
Beta Software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
As you may or may not know, I am a huge supporter of Opera, for a number of reasons.
And as that’s the case, I like to stay bleeding edge with the beta builds, but unfortunately the latest build (9815) tends to be temperamental. When it gets into one of its moods, it will crash a few times until it stops sulking and starts working. Now for normal people this would drive them insane, but that’s because they don’t use Opera.
Even if Opera crashes constantly on me 4 or 5 times in a row, I know that I can always open it up and it will resume exactly where I left off. And hey, that’s the price one pays for being current.
Now this is all well and good, but this is when the real problem starts, a couple of days ago I decided that I was going to see what the hype on Firefox 3 was all about. Yes I do keep Firefox installed on my machine even though I use Opera as my browser. The only reason I use Firefox is for web development, although I personally am against Firefox, I respect my viewers choice and opinion (as short sighted as it may be :P ).
Up till now the best tool for web development has been Firebug, which is the unfortunate reason I need Firefox installed.
But back to the crashing, Firefox 3 is also in beta, and while not as temperamental as Opera, it has its own little quirks.
And here it goes…on occasion I have had to resort to opening..IE (gasp, shock, panic, anger) and pasting a messaged URI in the address bar.
Not a good position to be in.
Oh Opera, please release another build!
Tags: beta, firebug, firefox, Opera, Software
Truecrypt
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
Well the newest addition to my software collection is TrueCrypt, an amazing open-source application supporting on-the-fly encryption.
Oh and did I mention its totally free and takes all of 5 min to setup. Unless that is, if you start poking around in their extensive online documentation - then you’re stuck for the better part of an hour. :P
The download was totally painless as the whole program is less then 5 MB, (only a 1.5MB rar download), and getting is setup is equally as painless if you follow the Beginners Tutorial step by step. There are quite a few options so just diving in, is probably not recommended unless you know a lot more about encryption, or just have a much higher risk tolerance towards the word “format”.
TrueCrypt has a couple of options when it comes to security precautions, you can have just the conventional password, (20 characters being the recommended, up to a maximum character amount of 64!), use a “keyfile”, or a combination of the both for ultimate security. The advantage of using a key file is that unless the user knows that they have to add a keyfile, they will keep getting innocent error messages from TrueCrypt. The keyfile can also be just a regular pre-existing file on your drive, which TrueCrypt does not modify - it just uses up to the first 1024KB. So as you will of course have other files on the drive, you can just use one (or more) as your keyfile. When combining that kind of security with a 20-30 character password, all I can really say is….Wow good luck!
So for me, I have a 3.99GB (maximum file size on a FAT partition) encrypted volume and I have enough space to run the unencrypter from the same drive, (it’s portable of course).
For anyone who read the Digg article on whether or not a defendant can be forced to divulge the password to his laptop, TrueCrypt also has the solution to the problem. By creating a hidden volume inside your encrypted volume, you have a plausible deniability on the questionable contents that may be stored on the drive.
Not that I am advocating child porn of course.
And if you havn’t been on Digg before, well, what can I say..
Tags: Encryption, Portable, Software, USB
