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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: Chris Calloway <ifoufo AT yahoo.com>
  • To: ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: your help with local mp3s
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 17:07:01 -0700 (PDT)

i need your help. all the cool kids are doing it. you
may as well, too.

in less than a couple of weeks, i teach (yes, i know,
hold your laughter) a computer programming boot camp
for research scientists in a number of disciplines.

for one of the first lessons, the class walks through
a nearly trivial program which parses ID3v1.0 tags out
of MP3 files and prints them. like so:

album=you win
comment=http://www.thestrugglers.org
title=the cascade range
artist=the strugglers
year=2005
genre=255

we'll do that because it's easy and fun compared to
what we normally do all day. ID3v1.0 tags are the last
128 bytes of an mp3 file if those bytes begin with the
string "TAG" and then the data is positional from
there. whoo-hoo. that's is about as easy as metadata
gets.

because not only local folks, but people from all over
the country are coming to this class, i thought it
would be fun to populate the example mp3 directory for
testing the program in this lesson with tunage from
some of my favorite local bands.

so i went to trianglerock.com and spent way to much
time downloading mp3s made by many of you kind people.

this despite deadlines are looming large quickly and i
really don't have time to spend skipping through mp3
gardens. i mean, sleep is entirely out of the question
for awhile. like, i've been meaning to write this
email for three months now and i can't wait any
longer.

so after spending this time downloading, what i find
is that very few of us tag our music files. the
strugglers, as shown above, are a very fine exception.
thank you, strugglers! the moaners, veronique
diabolique, vibrant green, and jett rink also get
merit badges for having at least partial tag data.

and you should tag your files. embedded tags are what
allow you to see what's playing in your player without
having to attach to some creepy file signature service
on the net collecting data about what you listen to.

so to finally get to the point, what i'm asking is, if
your local band has mp3 files you'd like a captive
audience of geeky science nerds to hear, tag 'em with
complete and informative ID3v1.0 tags and send 'em or
a link to 'em to me via private email at the from
address of this email. i'd be pleased as punch to plug
your tunes in return for a good sampling of complete
tag sets.

There's a whole crapload of freeware, shareware, and
otherware tag editors here:

http://www.dailymp3.com/id3tagging.html

and still a bunch more not listed there all over the
web.

also, i'm looking for id3v1 tags and not id3v2 tags.
id3v2 tags are more complicated and less suited for
this nearly trivial lesson. pretty much all of those
tag editors will let you choose which tag version you
are applying to your files and some are smart enough
to do both.

ok, thanks. that is all.

3





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