Blue Sparks

Note : This was developed for linux! It can most likely be made to work on windows, but it was not written for it!

I’ve written various tools over the years to help me out with tasks that take a long time, or are very boring/repetitive. I have uploaded one of these to my website. It is a small PHP script that I wrote in order to rip album art from ID3 tags (embedded in the MP3) and store the file as a BMP (windows bitmap) that rockbox will be able to read and display. I’m not sure it will be useful to everyone, but it’s there for the world.

The download is located here if you are interested.

And here’s the description from the ‘product’ page on my website:

“When I installed the Rockbox firmware on my iPod I was left with a dilemma. I had spent hours (days even!) downloading album art for my MP3 collection and tagging every file with it. Unfortunately Rockbox only supports album art as a BMP file, and not embedded art. I didn’t want to spend more days pulling art out so I could see it, and what would happen if I changed what I had on there?
Enter this little script that I hacked together one night. It will read ID3 tags for your MP3 collection, and dump BMP files into the album folders on your iPod. Woo!”

And there it is! If you want to check out more stuff, there’s a bunch located on the products portion of the main site (although products is misleading… I don’t actually sell anything but my time).

I was listening to my iPod again the other night while I was in bed reading. I had a raging desire to listen to some NIN; Pretty Hate Machine in particular. So, I fired up the album and let ‘er rip. The first thing I noticed was that the first song on the list, ‘Head Like a Hole‘, was actually ‘Kinda I Want To.’ Now, this is really odd! I know I mentioned this happening a few weeks ago with the Smashing Pumpkins, but I know for a fact that my NIN stuff is labelled correctly.

I took the time today to sftp into my home box, and download a copy of Head Like a Hole to verify. Guess what, the copy on my PC is actually right! This leads me to believe this is either a) a problem with rhythmbox or b) a problem with the iPod. I’m guessing it’s most likely the former… but it will require some digging to figure out what exactly is going on here.