Sunday, October 5th, 2008
iTunes Music Discovery
With the recent release of itunes 8 and it’s built in genius feature, it would seem that my work on similar playlist creation has become outdated. However, there is one thing that genius lacks: a feature that allows exploration of similar music apart from my own collection. Of course, there are suggestions from the itunes store, and I can preview 30 seconds from each of these songs, but that’s not always a good indication of whether I’ll like the song or not. So I decided to write a quick little program to combine the features of last.fm’s similar tracks functionality and seeqpod’s playable search. Here’s the result. It’s ugly, but it’s functional (as far as I’ve tested it). As always, interest will dictate how much additional work goes into the program.
Requires .Net framework
To run the program, unzip the folder, run the .exe file, and select a track in itunes. Then click on the “Generate List” button to start listening to new music!
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
A new (working) itunes lyric downloader
With the recently released iTunes 8.0, it seems that my itunes tagger app’s similar playlist functionality isn’t a big priority anymore. While I sometimes like the results from last.fm’s similar tracks better than itunes’, having Genius built into itunes is just a lot more convenient.
The one thing iTunes is still (surprisingly) missing is automatic lyrics downloading. A while back I wrote a quick program to find some lyrics from lyricwiki and sing365, but it has since become terribly outdated and provided no relevant results. And since I still get a couple hits a day for that program, I thought I’d update it for y’all.
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Updated itunes tagger program
The itunes last.fm tagger program has been updated. The old beta version has replaced the current itunes tagger program, and there is a new beta program on this page. The beta version has a couple cool new features that you might want to check out, including faster tagging, last.fm tag submissions, and similar tracks playlist generating.
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
itunes lastfm tagger now open source!
Alright, so it’s all out there in the open now. If you download it, it’ll probably be the worst coding you’ve seen. But maybe some people can fix that? We shall see. Anyways, have fun folks. Just goes to show that if enough people ask for open source, they’ll get it.
Sidenote: I love open source and all it stands for. And I know it took me a while, but I really wanted to write this one by my lonesome, as it’s my first ever program that’s actually starting to be useful. But, I can see a lot of potential here as well, so it’s time to let it run free 
Link: http://code.google.com/p/itunes-lastfm-tagger/
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
New iTunes Last.FM Tagger Release
I’ve just put together a new beta release of itunes tagger. It includes a couple really exciting features, which took a little bit more coding under the hood, but I think it was worth it.
- saves a list of tagged tracks
- saves your options on exit
- can make a playlist from a selected tag
- better error catching!
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
iTunes Last.FM Tagger v1.4 beta
I just finished updating the last.fm tagger. It actually wasn’t too bad finishing it off in vb.net. I’ll be looking to add some other features to the program in the near future. Leave a comment if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to see.
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
iTunes Last.FM Tagger v.1.3 beta
So, here it is. I finally got around to working on Cherbonsy’s suggestion of using the top Artist tag instead of the track tag from last.fm. I’ve updated the iTunes Tagger Page, so go take a look.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
iTunes Guitar Tab Downloader Released
Today I wrote a quick program that will automatically search for tabs of the selected tracks in iTunes. The tabs are saved as text files in a specified folder.
I’ve noticed over the years that it’s nice to have copies of guitar tabs on your computer, especially for days where the internet is broken and you have nothing to do. I also like the option of selecting all of my favourite tracks in iTunes (ie my 3-star+ smart playlist) and just browsing the text files. A lot of times it just doesn’t cross my mind to try and learn a certain song on guitar. Anyways, try it out and enjoy!
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
iTunes Last.FM Tagger with Automatic Mode
I just finished adding an automatic option for the itunes tagger. This means that the program will no longer overwrite any existing data unless the “Only check for missing data” option is disabled (in which case everything will be replaced). I also increased the delay between requests to last.fm. The web service provided by Last.fm will ban your IP address if more than 1 query is sent each second. This would be a very bad thing to happen, so I’ve set the program to only query every 2 seconds. As such, for each song you search in automatic mode, the program will require about 2.5 seconds (ie. 100 songs = 4.2 minutes).
Leave comments if you have anything to say about the latest release. Enjoy!
Friday, February 1st, 2008
iTunes Tagger (now with Last.FM tags!)
Turns out that the fingerprinting software from Musicip.com was a bit more restricted than I thought. So I completely redesigned my tagging program to work with a more recent player in the market, a last.fm fingerprinting client. This client was released by a guy named Norman (to whom I have no affiliation). To learn more about the last.fm fingerprinting program, visit here.
Anyways, the important part is this: The new program automatically searches the top 5 last.fm tags for each selected track, then saves the top tag as the song genre and saves all 5 tags in the comments. I actually have genres now for my top 300 tracks in itunes, from a mere 10 minutes of tagging. Give it a try and see how it works. The biggest problem? People who use ridiculous tags on Last.fm
Oh, and the program will also automatically find any missing metadata for your track using the last.fm fingerprinting stuff as well as some musicbrainz data. Pretty nifty.
