jonathancraddock.com:TECH

Exporting a WinAmp Playlist ( Blog )

Sunday, 24 October 2010 20:12

Over the past couple of weeks I been putting together a six hour WinAmp playlist for our forthcoming Halloween party, but needed an extra couple of processes to get this to play via the Logitech Squeezebox setup on our Hi-Fi. Leaving aside any specifics, I wanted all the tracks in the playlist (from a mix of drives and folders) to be copied into a single folder and be numbered sequentially. Furthermore, I then wanted these 'duplicate' files to have their volumes normalized. Finally, the solution had to be free! As you can imagine, there are multiple solutions for exporting playlists, etc, and I'd also considered just processing the playlist into a batch file and xcopy-ing what I needed.

Having thought about it, I decided to post the following two links as they seemed to provide the quickest and easiest solution.

Export:
For this I used a WinAmp plugin called Gen_Yar. At 9 kb it's a tiny download and simply adds an item (copy playlist files) into the right-click menu in the WinAmp player. Apparently it's for WinAmp 2, but it worked fine for me. You tell it where you want the files put, and it does it. Couldn't be easier!

Normalize:
For this I used MP3 Gain. Found it on SourceForge, but take care which version you download, as I found I needed the one that included the VB runtime files. As above, it's quick and simple, and normalizes the volume of all tracks in a folder without any loss of quality.

Good luck!

Automatic Geo-Tagging ( Blog )

Saturday, 04 September 2010 22:42

Getting back out into the Northern Fells again on Saturday, I decided to try and automatically geo-tag my photos using the tracklog from my GPS. There appear to be various solutions for this. Essentially, you need an application to read your GPS's tracklog, which you save in a folder with all the associated photographs. The geo-tagging application compares the date/time stamp of the photo with the tracklog, and writes the co-ordinates into the EXIF data of each photograph.

The walk was in the North West corner of the Northern Fells (Wainwright, book 5) and the album is HERE.

After a bit of Googling for reviews and ratings of suitable (ie/ free!) solutions, I settled on Geosetter, which is a German product with the option to install in English. For my purposes, very quick and easy to use. I just exported the tracklog as a GPX file, saved it in the images folder, and Geosetter did the rest.

The absolute top tip if you intend to do this is to ensure that the time on your GPS and the time on your camera is in sync. Being a technically minded person I obviously did exactly that - after all, I'm not stupid. Unfortunately, I didn't check to see if the date was set correctly...

So, my second product endorsement is for another application from the same author, called Exifer. This allows you to batch process EXIF data to correct the time/date stamps. It also does a lot more than that, but all I needed was the date change, and it worked great. The product is discontinued, but as stated, it's quick, simple and did what I needed.

However, remember to check the date and time in your camera, and it will be a lot easier!

stevenhorner.com ( Blog )

Monday, 30 November 2009 11:58

Contributed a logo and background to stevenhorner.com, a blog with a bit more focus than my generally random ramblings.

Check out the site for walks in Scotland and Northern England, kit reviews, technology, and more!

Firebug, etc. ( Blog )

Monday, 16 November 2009 13:26

Highly recommend the Firefox addon Firebug. Been using it for a couple of days and wondering how I managed without it. The element inspector is great - just hover over an item on your site and see exactly why it's not doing what you want it to!

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