August 27, 2008 at 3:24 pm · Filed under Software

MixWizard expressed interest in trying out my Compilation Tag Modifier script, but I agree having to install Strawberry Perl and compile a bunch of modules on Windows is a pain, so I looked into packaging the script into an EXE complete with modules. PAR Packager seemed a good choice, so I used that and gave him the EXE. But he found that it wouldn’t work, it would crash like this:

Finding directories...done, found 276 directories
Checking directories for valid music files...done, now have 247 directories
Finding directories with more than 2 artists...
Unknown encoding 'UTF-16' at MP3/Tag/ID3v2.pm line 1921

I tried using an eval statement to catch error messages and ignore them, but that didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t understand why the script ran fine on it’s own, but didn’t when packaged together. I googled around a bit, and discovered someone having a similar trouble, and there was a solution. I tried it, and it now works!

The problem was, the Encode module uses an eval statement of it’s own, and PAR Packager doesn’t know what modules that will load without actually running the script. So I ran the script myself with an extra line of code:

print STDERR "$_\n" for grep {/Encode/} sort keys %INC;

Which allowed me to see what encode modules are loaded, and then I ‘use’d them explicitly in the script. I packaged it again, and now it works!

I’ll probably be releasing a packaged EXE soon, I just need MixWizard to test it himself.

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August 26, 2008 at 4:43 pm · Filed under Software

I couldn’t sleep in the taxi on the way to Bristol Airport at 4 o’clock in the morning to catch the plane to Cyprus for my vacation. Instead I worked out how to improve my MP3 and M4A Compilation Tag Modifier script (I really need to think of a decent name for it). I decided it needed to work through your music library itself, without needing to be moved around all the directories by the user. It also needed to be intelligent and work out which albums were compilation albums based on the number of artists. And finally, it needed to ask the user if everything is OK (something that could in future be made an option, but for now you have to go through with it), just in case it’s got something wrong.

Today I sat down and coded all of these things, and also used it as an excuse to try out git, which was fun.

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August 25, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Linux

The perfectionist inside me has been furious at how fetchmail keeps flooding my mail server’s logs with messages about invalid SSL certificates (one of my hosts uses ‘localhost’ as the name in the certificate…), making it almost impossible to check what’s going on with my mail server and so forth. Fetchmail itself has no way of removing these messages (the response seems to be ‘tell your host to fix their SSL certificate or put up with it’), so I was trying to find a sysklogd replacement that supported filtering so I could filter out these annoying messages, but they all seemed to take far too much effort.

Then I had a brainwave: do it myself. And so this is my lesson learnt – if in doubt, write a Perl script.

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August 15, 2008 at 6:11 pm · Filed under Software

My music collection is very varied, amongst it are quite a few compilation dance albums, which often have different artists listed for every single track. This is fine, but makes browsing by artist impossible on an iPod or in the iTunes library, as so many of them are just single tracks from compilation dance albums. I decided to fix the issue. Read the rest of this entry »

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