Music

Delete Songs From Smart Playlists in iTunes

Update 2009-11-23: Corrected Mac keyboard keys.  I don’t own a Mac myself, but a friend of mine tells me that iTunes defies the normal behaviour of many other Apple applications. Probably because it’s ancient and desperately needs an update.

Made a smart playlist to find songs you want to delete, then found that the delete function no longer works?

Just hold Shift. Or Option.

Pressing Shift+Delete on Windows or Option+Delete on Mac will give you a prompt to delete songs just like any other delete operation performed in the library.

Holding Shift on Windows or Option on Mac and right-clicking on one or more songs will show “Delete” in the context menu.

As an aside, this shortcut also allows you to delete songs from static playlists as well.

Ogg Vorbis Encoder for Windows

I not so long ago made a post about using Ogg Vorbis for Ringtones on Android, as it considerably reduces the lag between getting a phone call and the phone actually playing the ringtone.  The same goes for music on the device–it just starts playing quicker.

Anyway, just now I realised that I didn’t link to any encoders for it.  So if anyone wondered what I used to accomplish the task, they’d be stuck!

So here’s a quick update to fill in in the gaps:

If you’re wanting to just convert some files you already have into Ogg Vorbis, I’d recommend oggdropXPd.  Open the program, right-click on the “dropbox” that appears to configure it, then when it’s all done, drag and drop the files you want to convert onto the dropbox, and wait!  It works fine under Windows Vista (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit).

If you’re wanting to both edit a music track into a short ringtone and convert to Ogg Vorbis, Audacity did the job for me.  It’s open-source and supports a number of file types (including MP3 if you download a separate plug-in), so hopefully it’ll work for you too.  Again, it works fine in Windows Vista (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit).

The settings I used for the Ogg Vorbis files on my G1 where 128kbps CBR.  You don’t need much quality because the phone’s speaker isn’t exactly an orchestra, and I used Constant Bitrate under the assumption it would take less CPU to decode. If you know otherwise, please let me know!

Use Ogg Vorbis for Lag-free Ringtones on Android

Why, do I hear you cry?

Simple really, here’s the story: when I first transferred various files to my phone for use as ringtones (one each for calls, texts, e-mails…) I used MP3s.  Thanks to the Rings Extended application in the marketplace I had no trouble in using them.

But one thing struck me as odd whenever I got a call (or text etc.); lag.  If I were to get a call right now, the phone would vibrate, the screen would turn black, and then a couple of seconds later the contact details show and my ringtone starts playing.  Not ideal.

So I decided to try something.  I set one of the standard ringtones that came with the phone as the current ringtone, and tried again.  This time the phone started vibrating and played the tone at the same time.

After that I had to figure out what format they used, since I had no idea where the files could be and what format they were.  I reasoned that Ogg Vorbis would be the format they’d use — an open-source OS with open-source ringtones.  Makes sense, right?

So I tried it: I converted those same ringtones I started out with to 128kbps CBR Vorbis files.  128kbps because I thought that a higher bitrate would lag the phone out (plus you wouldn’t hear a quality difference from the speaker anyway), and CBR because I thought it would be easier for the decoder to work with, though I have no evidence to back this up.

Voilà!  Suddenly my ringtones loaded a lot quicker, and no longer did I get vibrations with no accompanying ringtone (unless it was set to vibrate only!).

I haven’t tested other settings on the Vorbis encoder (different bitrates, VBR etc.), nor have I tested other formats aside from MP3 and Ogg.

Hope this is of help to someone that actually cares about this stuff.

Strip ID3v1 Tags from MP3s in Linux

For kicks I decided to remove all the ID3v1 tags from my music files today.  They were just getting in the way and served no useful purpose — since I had perfectly fine ID3v2 tags — so they just had to go.

I cooked up a little command to help out here!  But first, we need to make sure you have the command that we’re going to need here, id3v2.  Install it from the official repositories using your distribution’s package manager.  For example, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install id3v2

This command is used to view and manipulate ID3 tags inside of music files.  One argument in particular is of use to us, -s, which strips ID3v1 tags out of the specified file(s).

With that in mind the task is just getting a list of the files that you want to remove ID3v1 tags from.  I’ve managed to solve that and fit it all in one line — don’t forget to replace the path with the correct one:

find /path/to/music -name \*.mp3 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 id3v2 -s

That’s it! After testing I ran it on my whole music library and it appears to have survived just fine. Just be patient (and careful) if you’re stripping tags out of hundreds or thousands of files.

Let me know how it works out for you, and any improvements you may have!

Reset iTunes Dimensions to Fit Resolution

Here’s a handy little feature that I find useful.  If you ever play around with the size or location of the iTunes window and want to make it fit the screen better, simply follow the instructions:

If you’re on Windows:

hold Shift and either double-click the title bar or single-click the maximise button  (The title bar is the small bar at the top that says “iTunes” in the middle.)

If you’re on Mac OS:

hold Option and click the Zoom (+) button

This’ll reset the size and position to its default for your screen resolution.  Assuming you haven’t changed screen resolution since installing it, it’ll look just as it did when you first installed it — nearly filling the entire screen, but not quite.  It’s also a very useful shortcut if you ever change your screen resolution.

Doing the operation a second time will move the iTunes window back to where it was before you started reading this article and messing with it.  Simple!