Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

I download a lot of songs. I am no position to brag about having the largest collection of songs, because I really don’t have the largest collection by any standards. Right now, I only have 535 MP3s – some Hindi, some English, a few Marathi songs and Bhajans and a handful of Marathi Stand-up comedy mp3s. Now I am a fanatic when it comes to organizing things! So I have created quite a few playlists such as Old, 70s, 80s, 90s, 200x, New Songs, Fresh, Dance, Disco, Marathi, etc to organize my audio collection.

Here is what I have been doing recently to keep a good backup of my music on an external drive and have it in the same organized manner as the way I am used to having on my iPhone.

Exporting to directories:

I don’t like the way iTunes organizes the physical files because it categorizes by the Artist and then the Album. Sometimes the ID3 tags contain all kinds of crap, and that creates strange directories in your iTunes Music folder. So there are 2 ways in which you can avoid this -

1. Fix the ID3 tags before you import the file into iTunes – I use Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) and Audio Shell Mp3 Shell Extension (http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm) for this. I clean up all ID3 tags to my liking using these tools before I import the file into iTunes. But this just ensures that you don’t have weird directory names. iTunes will still organizes by Artist and Album – which doesn’t work for me.

2. You could use an exporter that can export the PLAYLISTS to physical directories. Now I did not find one that did that. So I wrote my own (iTunesXP). This will soon be available from my site – Softricks.com.

Organizing files into Playlists:

Prior to this, I used to drag the mp3s by hand into appropriate playlists.

Today, I thought about setting the ID3 tag Genre as the name of the playlist and making all playlists Smartlists that look for certain strings in the Genre. What if a song is in 2 playlists? Well, use comma separated names in the genre. The Smartlist can say – where Genre contains “xyz”.

More..

I started downloading some relevant Artwork for every song in my collection. I know it is a bit too much.. but I kinda’ like to see the artwork whenever a song is playing on my iPhone rather than have a blank space.

I realized that iTunes allows for mass updating various ID3 fields. Many downloads come with some junk in the “Comments” field or “Lyrics” field. If you select all songs and do “Get Info” in iTunes, you can, say, blank out “Comments” field for all of them at once!

I know it’s a lot of work.. but I guess I like to have a quality collection!

When I was in high school, I took Biology as an elective besides Electronic Instrumentation. I don’t remember why I did that especially since I was never cut to be a doctor. I certainly did not know back then, what I was getting into. Anyway, my vivid memories of my high-school Biology adventures are not for the faint hearted! But well, they are what they are.. Things will get graphic in this post, just like my memories are.. but I am sure many of us who did Biology in high school would remember this and that could lead to some introspection.

Basically, Biology had 2 separate limbs, Botany and Zoology. Botany was pretty harmless and non-violent, whereas Zoology came with some bloody violence. Later in my life I learned that I was lucky enough to get away with just Earthworms and Frogs – and I never had to cut a cockroach or a mouse or whatever else they did in other colleges.

This whole massacre used to be called “Dissection”. I just think it was a mass murder, ethnic cleansing of sort! I doubt how much it helped me in my knowledge about that poor animal. I always say that if you really hate someone and you want to curse him, you might wish him to end up like that in front of some “student” in his next life!

So, we had these slaughterhouses in our colleges that we called the “Labs”, where they would gather all the “students” – some willing and some really unwilling like me, and make them murder these poor animals in semi-conscious state. These “Lab” sessions still might exist in colleges even today, although I have heard lately that they are finally contemplating on using computers for all this now.

We started with these tiny, slimy, wriggling creatures – the Earthworms. Somehow, the Earthworms did not stir the same kind of repulsive, nauseating feelings in me, as the Frogs later did. Of course, I was never fond of any crawling creatures. But it is amazing the way different kinds of feelings work in you – so if a creature is small, you don’t think it is capable of feeling any pain. Kinda’ like, killing an ant is easier than killing a chicken?

Anyway, these Earthworms used to be firmly pinned at the head and the tail, on a tray in front of us. We were supposed to cut it open without rupturing its nerve ring. Whoever managed to do that got the highest credits! I still remember I could never keep the nerve ring intact and then I used to just adjust it so that it would at least look intact to the examiner! So far so good..

Somewhere towards the middle of the year, our lab assistant brought a big bucket with him.. We had special trays in front of us that day – which had 4 corner hooks. All of us were just sitting at our lab desks and suddenly with a thud, an “almost” unconscious frog drops flat in front of each one of us! I still remember girls shrieking and some boys like me trying to look brave even though they were shit scared from inside! Over the course of few more weeks, this routine would repeat. Some of us enjoyed it, some of us did not..

The frogs used to be anesthetized using Chloroform, but I still remember that some of them were not completely unconscious and used to try to get up right in the middle of their dissection and then the screams would follow! We were supposed to tie their legs and hands to the board on which they were to be dissected, and I remember I never had the guts to touch the frog to tie him up. I used to pass the strings around his legs and hands making sure not to touch him and then tie the knot. On the other hand, some kids were brave and I say, those were the dangerous kind.. for the frogs! I am sure the helpless frogs lying on their backs in front of us, must have hoped that these “knowledge hungry kids” with scalpels, kill them instantly rather than slowly. But it was never meant to be that way…

I am still not sure what I learned from the whole experience. We would lose some points, for example, if we did not keep their hearts beating during the whole ordeal. Well, this might be so that they can teach us to be light handed during this “operation”, but if I think about it now, a person like me did not achieve anything by prolonging the pain for those poor creatures back then. Whether it is either the digestive system today, or the nervous system the next week, or some other system the following week – every system in the body required a new body to be killed..

It all ended in an exam for me, and fortunately then, I had to cut an Earthworm and not a frog! As usual I could not keep the nerve ring intact, but I managed to fake it and be done with it. I moved on, towards bloodless, non-violent study options, and back in those Biology labs, newer generations of frogs kept sacrificing their lives. Some sacrificed to give birth to future doctors, but some did so, for nothing. And this wasn’t a producer-consumer ecosystem, because not everybody consumed the knowledge that was supposed to come out of it..

So here I am, just putting something in writing, for those frogs I killed to pass my exams. If I could change some things in my high school life, this would be one of the things I would. This post, is just in memory of those unfortunate souls..