He's Blog

Pimp My Music Library

// June 13th, 2011 // No Comments » // Computer, Guides, Music, Tips

If you know me well in person, you probably know that I love listening to music. Music keeps me company during my long bus rides, soothes my mind, gives me inspiration for stories and motivation to play musical instruments. I listen mostly to mainstream music, with the exception of Rap and R&B music. Thus as an avid listener of music, it’s hard for me not to keep up with the evolution of mainstream music.

In this post, I’ll share with you guys my routine of uncovering new songs that are dominating our speakers nowadays. Also, I’ll show you how I maintain my music collection.

Step 1: Discovering new songs

1. Billboard Top 100

2. The Top Charts from iTunes Store

Unfortunately, the music that gets blasted on speakers nowadays are seldom to my liking. So I often have to find other means of discovering music.

3. Last.fm

Last.fm is a paid service that costs $3.00 USD (aprrox $3.80 SGD) a month. In return, you get rewarded with gobs of new music. In short, Last.fm offers an excellent database of music and the ability to network with other users. What it essentially does is that it recommends you songs based on the kind of music you like to listen to with its customized radio. The customized radio makes smart choices based on other users’ input. For example, searching for Piano Rock music yields me many songs that are tagged Piano Rock by the community. Pretty cool, huh? And if you’re using a mobile that utilizes Android or iOS, you can download the Last.fm app for your mobile devices. That way, you can use Last.fm’s services anywhere you are ;)

4. Shazam

Finally, an app that can regonize the song that is playing in the background! I’ve been waiting for such an app since I was a teenager! Shazam can identify the name, album, and artist of a song just by hearing it over your iPhone’s microphone. You’ll have to hold the iPhone mic close to the speaker for a few seconds as a song plays – on the radio, in a coffeeshop, or at a party. More often than not, Shazam will accurately report back with the song’s name, and (if available) and other useful details. In case you’re wondering, it does work for songs other than English and soundtracks as well… although sometimes it can fail terribly.

Step 2: Downloading the songs

There are almost countless different ways you can go about stealing songs. But I’ll still show you my method of downloading music anyway. In all humbleness, I believe that my method is the most efficient and the most reliable way of downloading particular tracks. Therefore, after reading through this, you should just forget your old method and follow my method XD

Floating in the vast waters is a talented software named after its creator. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I present to you SciLor’s Grooveshark Downloader.

Don’t be deceived by its simple design. This nifty software can fetch you nearly all mainstream music you ever come across, all nicely tagged and transcoded into high quality MP3s. Unfortunately, this is unique only to Windows. Sorry Mac users :(

Now the reason why I said this method of downloading particular tracks is the best is because of its source of music, Grooveshark. In case you’re wondering, Grooveshark is a popular online music search engine and music streaming service. Think of it as Youtube, without the videos and high quality music. Coincidentally, the music player featured on He’s Blog is fueled by Grooveshark too. But wait, I haven’t said why it’s the best yet. You see, because Grooveshark has a strict uploading policy like ensuring that the songs uploaded by users have to be of at least 128kbit/s and properly tagged. So you can be rest assured that the songs you download from Grooveshark are the real deal, unlike some trash you get from using your own method. C’mon, you jolly well know what I’m talking about. Afterall, Grooveshark’s primary goal is to provide you with free, high quality music streaming. Without a doubt, Grooveshark has fulfilled their goal. So now do you concur that my method is the best? ;)

Step 3: Managing your library

Warning: This step can be a serious pain in the ass.

Here’s how my iTunes look like:

Click to enlarge picture.

Personally, I sort my music according to their Date Added. All my music are properly tagged, of high quality and contain their album art and lyrics. Not sure about you guys but I find this step extremely important, especially when you own an iPod because without proper tagging, your iPod will look really messed up. When that happens, my OCD acts up and it makes me wanna pull all my hair out and /wrist. But obviously, it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this manually. Trust me, I tried doing manually tagging for about 1 year before finally giving up. It consumes way too much time. That’s when I told myself that there’s got to be a software that does this kind of tedious task. And I was right. After much googling, I stumbled upon Pollux - software that automatically tags the song name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for you.

Regrettably, it’s not free. It costs $10 USD per year, but it will be worth the buck especially when you have a huge library of music to be tagged.

However, I do have to comment that it’s not foulproof. Here are some of its flaws:

1. Wrong tagging. Sometimes, it tags some songs as being live or part of a “Greatest Hits” album. (about 10% of the time)
2. Lyrics are left out at times (about 40% of the time)
3. No album art at times (about 20% of the time)
4. Does not tag at all (about 10% of the time

In summary, there are still certain tracks that you have to tag yourself. But considering that I had 1k plus songs to tag, it’s pretty worth the money. But I won’t be continuing my subscription after this year since I find manually tagging more reliable in tagging the newest additions as compared to using a simi-buggy program.

So there you have it! Now go pimp your music collection. ;)

Signs off,
He

Getting torrent files with offline trackers to work

// September 17th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Computer, Guides

Are a majority of your torrent files showing up error messages in your Bittorrent client recently?

Well, that is because the trackers listed in the torrents are offline or dead, which means there is nothing in that torrent file that tells your client which peers to connect to. As a result, your download/upload tasks come to a dreadful halt. One major reason for the disappearance of these trackers is the downfall of the self-proclaimed “World largest Bittorrent Tracker”, The Pirate Bay. To many, The Priate Bay is just a torrent indexing site where people can search for torrents and download them. But the truth is, it is actually way more than that. In fact, The Priate Bay is actually responsible for more than half of all Bittorrent traffic (hence the title “World largest Bittorrent Tracker”) even for torrents that you download from other torrent indexing sites like Mininova or isoHunt.

As a result, most of our torrent files, especially the old ones, are left to rot without a new tracker. I have spent a couple of days researching on this and I came up with a wonderful solution that works with torrents with the now-defunct The Pirate Bay tracker. So fret not! Today, I’ll teach you how to remedy this and get your torrent files alive and kicking again!

1. Go to Torrent Editor

2. Under the Torrent heading, you can choose to upload the torrent file either by inputing the torrent link or uploading the torrent file. Either way it works.

Click on the Edit It button when you’re done.

3. You’ll be presented this page.

See all the dead trackers with the red background? Go ahead and delete them away until you have none left. Then go ahead and paste this tracker URL in the text box and please don’t forget to press the green plus sign to add it.

http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce

4. Next, click on download to download the new version of the torrent file. Or if you want, you can also choose to click on update to see whether the new tracker is working or not but it’ll take sometime before the stats to show up.

5. So there you have it, double click on your torrent file and start downloading like before!

If you have any questions or information to share, feel free to drop a comment!

Happy sharing!

Sign off,
He

One gear close to driving & guide to acing the theory tests

// September 14th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Guides, Life

As of 10 September 2009, I am one gear closer to driving a car.

I am proud to announce that I have passed both my Basic Theory Test and Final Theory Test, which means I can finally sign up for the 20+ practical lessons before legally driving a car around in Singapore. A big yay for the people who will eventually benefit from this. You know who you guys are =/ But thinking back, I realize that passing them might not really mean much of a deal. I mean, if you take into consideration how many people are there in the Singapore that are driving, it’s not really that much of a deal. But whatever, I passed them and I no longer have to worry about the theory part anymore. Now that’s something remarkable.

Also, I decided to put myself aside and share with you guys my guide for the Theory Tests. For those of you who are planning to sign up for a driving course, this is going to come in handy for you. So sit back, buckle up and off we go!

He’s Guide To Acing The Driving Theory Tests

Now before you can actually sign up for the practical lessons, you will have to pass 2 Theory Tests, namely the Basic Theory Test and Final Theory Test. Your common sense should tell you that you’ll have to pass your Basic Theory Test in order to sign up for the Final Theory Test.

In order to prepare for your test, there are actually three methods you can go by to prepare for the test. The three methods are:

• Study the handbooks supplied by the school
• Study from the school’s e-Learning system
• Study from the e-Trial sessions

You can basically just choose any of the methods and still pass. The driving tests are THAT easy. However, I do have friends who failed them. Luckily for them, I’m not gona shame them here. Heh!

Anyway, if you want to know my method of studying. Here’s how I studied for the tests and if you follow my advice well enough, I assure you that you will pass with flying colors!

First and the most important step of all, book your test date and book an e-Trial session directly before the test. This is very important, guys. Reason being, the questions, whether they are from the e-Trial sessions or the actual tests, are actually repeated questions. So if you did 300 questions, which means 6 papers (no joke, I did 6 papers during both my BTT and FTT e-Trial sessions), during the e-Trial sessions, you’ll most likely encounter the same questions to the point that you can just faceroll on the screen and still get correct. We call that a Faceroll. Yeah, rolling your face on a keyboard and still win.

So after booking, give yourself at least 1 day’s time to prepare for each test. For me, it’s almost always last minute studying so I chose the day before the actual test date. First, read through the entire book and do make an effort to highlight the important points so when you look through it the 2nd time, you’ll be able to scan through the book, paying attention to only the hightlighted portions.

When you’re done with the book, you can safely tell yourself that you will pass the test. But if it’s your first time and you’re not confident or you are just afraid that you’ll get embarassed on the actual day when the big red FAIL slaps you on the face and the bangla sitting beside you laughs at you, you can still log into the e-Learning section of the school’s website and watch the video tutorials there. They’re pretty useful and I must admit some of the things mentioned there are not included in the book. But the best part is actually the self-evualtion tests. The entire content is split into modules and after each module, there are 5 questions which you can do to double check.

At the end of all of the modules, there is an actual e-trial session that you can do at home. Before I go on, these e-Trial sessions are essentially the tests. They contain 50 questions and are similiar to the way that the test is going to be structured, excluding the idea that you have to use a pen or your finger to nagivate around. I’ll skip this for now, I’ll talk about it later. So just go ahead and do them at the end of your revision. If you pass, congratuations! You can safely tell yourself that you will pass the test and go to sleep. If you fail, don’t worry too much about it and take a good look at the explanation for the questions you did wrongly. Have a good night’s rest, there’s still tomorrow where you can attend your e-Trial session before going for the actual test.

At the e-Trial session, which lasts 45 minutes, you will be able to attempt 6 papers if you’re really fast enough. Just go ahead and do them before attempting your actual test. There’s really no reason to fail if you’ve been to the e-trial sessions. OH!!! If there’re any reasons why you might potentially fail the test. Here is why.

• Unlike most touchscreen monitors, the monitors in the classroom somehow only reacts to your fingernails, not your fingertips. So use your fingernails to press on the answers and not your fingertips.

Well. This is it. I hope this guide will prove to be useful to you guys who plan to pick up driving.

Laters!

Sign off,
He