Pulp Free

After one of the most terrifyingly mediocre Mexican lunches that I’ve had in probably years, I had the opportunity of a lifetime present itself to me today.

This:

Plus this:

Led to an extra 25 minute lunch outing in the attempt to obtain the privilege of spending an extra 30 cents a gallon for E85 fuel (based on comparative MPG of regular gasoline). My only hope that when we actually arrived at this oasis of fuel stations that:

A. The lines wouldn’t be too long
B. There would be some E85 left

Amazingingly enough, there was only one fuel pump and nobody was around using it!

Probably the only real benefit… um… of getting this fuel… well - hmmm - we couldn’t come up with one. Oh yeah - we’re saving the planet by utilizing a product that makes the US less dependent on foreign oil. What about:

• You can’t find it.
• You’d probably have to buy a new car or truck to use it
• Contains less energy than gasoline making you have to fill up more often (about 1.4 gallons to every 1 gallon of gasoline)

It was a delightful post-lunch drive complete with Waylon Jennings honky tonk music (hey - we were driving in a pickup). How long this effort continues will require a little more research into practicality. Not that I’m not interested in the long-term survival of our American Way Of Life - but at some point it needs to make dollars and sense.

Surprisingly - I’ve actually kept up with my morning swimming routine since mid-March of this year. Two, sometimes three times a week I find some way to get myself out of bed at 6am and drive myself to the local natatorium for a good 30 minute swim. Back in my “smaller” sized days - I used to actually swim competitively and I’m clearly a long ways away from getting all of my old strokes and times back in order.

One of the coolest things that I’ve seen since being back in the swim practice is a device called a “SuitMate“. Essentially this is a “swimsuit water extractor” that removes up to 95% of a suit’s water in just 10 seconds. Think of it as a (somewhat) noisy spin cycle for your swimsuit. Yeah - I wish they had those back in the day… a perfectly ingenious invention. (And only $1400 if you want to order one on their Web site!)

So after washing off the chlorine from the pool and walking up to our “SuitMate” - there happened to be somebody already using it. No big deal - its only a few seconds to finish up each cycle… However - since I’ve been swimming for about 6 months now - I pretty much know who all of the guys are that are swimming. (I’ll probably post some interesting observations on that social club interaction at a later date…)

But I didn’t recognize this guy…

I was like, “oh no….”

And sure enough - what does he pull out of the “swimsuit water extractor”? You guessed it - his now 95% dry underwear. (The pool is part of a larger community center with workout areas, indoor running tracks, etc.)

Gulp.

It still makes me feel a little queasy on that one. It’s not “UnderwearMate” I stood there for a few moments in disbelief and then tossed my own swimming suit in to shake off the water. Maybe the left over chlorine will protect it like bleach or something… Better just to get it into the laundry.

I’ve have MP3 files around for as long as I can remember. Actually - I had MP2 files way back in the day. So it’s safe to say that I’ve already organized my collection and everything is all nice and neat. All items tagged with ID3 tags and life couldn’t be grander. No matter what player or organizer I use, I can search, stream, and playback music all over my house, on my iPod, in my car - you name it, I’m there. This of course, wouldn’t be possible with the shear number of MP3 files I have without my trusty ol’ MP3ext program.

While it’s made my life of updating my MP3 files with the correct ID3 information about as easy as sliced bread, it wasn’t until I took on my next challenge did I found out what joy it would actually bring me. (Yes - I’m being cynical - wait for it…)

Album cover art.

And no - it’s not because the iPhone and the new iPod makes it look so cool to flip covers around…

You want to talk about wasting plenty of time to go back through my entire collection and search out album covers? Just searching Google for a potential program to help me out hurt my head… There’s so much junk out there that it just… blah.

But alas - I found a great program called Album Cover Art Downloader. The latest version is 1.6.0 - and by latest I mean - the Web site doesn’t exist any more and it’s almost 3 years old. But - it’s super easy to grab album art off of the Web and it’s free!! Click, click, click - PNG files are dropped into the Image ID3 (and I had it drop off a PNG file into the directory as well) - I’m now enjoying life. (For those of you that think iTunes is the greatest - it’s not bad. It’s just that version 7 doesn’t embed the images into the actual MP3 files any more and I don’t manage my collection with that tool anyway… And most of the tools out there to grab album art actually use iTunes to get the images - and it’s encrypted now - which of course breaks all of those other “free” applications.

Yes - I’m getting verbose… Now to the point.

Only about a third of my MP3 collection works with Album Cover Art Downloader. Hmmm, you say? What do I mean? At first I thought it odd that the program couldn’t read the ID3 tags when I clicked on the files. Surely this is a problem with the application. No other program has an issue with my MP3 files! So I typed in the song Artist and Album name myself. Search - bing… It shows up.

Go to save the image that I want:

Error.

Ugh.

What’s this TSIZ stuff? Found garbage where I expected a Frame Id?

Hey - Google - let’s go find a solution! (Knowing that I’ll never get a fix from either of these two pieces of outdated software…)

Well - I spent the last 2 months looking for a solution. I just had to find an easy way to bulk load images!! Grabbing images off of Amazon and manually going into my MP3-Info application was killing me! (I did if for a while… but I lost interest fast!)

Long an behold - I came across this tidbit from Google that actually was from an indexed Python script:

# MP3ext causes illegal frames to be inserted, which must be ignored.
_known_bad_frames = [
"\x00\x00MP",
"\x00MP3",
" MP3",
"MP3e",
"\x00MP",
" MP",
"MP3",
]

Well - the script was called MP3Info.py - I was like - A-HA! My ID3 tagger program was causing me issues!!

Okay - moving on.

So it seems that maybe I’m writing out bad MP3 files somewhere along the way. Back to Google for help. Let’s look for something to “fix” my “bad” MP3 files. Even though 1/3 of them work, maybe some had some bad headers in there. I use the same software to rip my CDs (Audiograbber) - same LAME plug-in I’ve been using forever. (I actually purchased it back when it wasn’t free… One of the few… Just like MOD4WIN!) - But I came up short. Try doing a search for MP3 cleaner or repair tool and you get thrust into a never ending set of $15 shareware tool links. Ugh. I tried most of them out - all of them said my files were fine! AGH!

At this point, I’m sad. Frustrated. Thinking all hope is lost. (How oh how will I be able to help Jessica Simpson into my MP3 files? She seems so sad!)

Now jump ahead to this past weekend…

I find this Google result - The ultimate way to tag and rename mp3s - Yeah - “mp3, tag, repair, mp3ext” - Martin talks about his #1 tool for helping him out with tagging MP3 files. I was like - okay… I’ll try one more. Maybe this one will help.

Long and behold - this one piece of Russian software was my miracle worker.

By simply selecting multiple songs, Tag Scanner will actually write out the songs from scratch with the correct ID3 information. I’m not even changing the information. What I get is a new file with all of my original tags in it - but without the offending header information! So I ran a few tests… Album Cover Art Downloader can now see the ID3 tags - it now saves the downloaded covers into the MP3 file and I’m halfway through my updates in no time flat!!!

What a sigh of relief!! My anguish no longer killing me! (Am I being too over dramatic yet? Can’t you tell how ecstatic I am finding this solution!!)

Of course, it’s almost all peaches for me… but a few items bug me. It renames the track number field to include “01″ instead of the “1″ I’ve so meticulously changed on all of my tracks. That’s okay - I can change that. (C’mon MP3-Info!) Of course, MP3-Info just breaks the ID3 information again - but, as well… That’s okay - I already have my album are safely tucked away.

So I’m writing this super long monstrosity of a post so that not only can I share my deep rooted need to have my MP3 files cataloged correctly (and now waste even more time getting all of the album covers!) - hopefully this will be helpful for at least one other person out there. (If it happens to be you - leave a message!)

Now it’s time to get those colorful screen shots put in here and head to bed!!

And yes - Jessica Simpson is now quite happy to be embedded in my MP3 files…