Clusty's Blog

I have been annoyed for some time now that my favourite cloud storage project – Wuala – could never integrate with Windows. A few days back during an usual Wuala upgrade I noticed that it wanted to install a new proggie to “enhance” OS integration. The library in question is called Dokan.

This is a library that implements user land filesystem drivers. The library itself takes care of handling all the nasty windows kernel calls needed for the usual filesystem driver, providing a simpler interface to the programmer. The actual functionality is provided through plugins which do not need Administrator privileges.

Besides the nice development implications of this, I was happy to finally be able to attach a network disk to a remote SSH location, something that SSHFS+FUSE was doing for ages now under Linux. The FUSE project started pretty much to support SSH and FTP filesystem mounting.

This is absolutely awesome news for all those forced to constantly peddle data between Windows/Linux with WinSCP or likes. This gets old really fast since running local apps on remote data, you are forced to copy data locally and re-upload it by hand. The SSHFS module gives you a comfy GooWee for mounting.

Unfortunately I never got the SSHFS module for Dokan to work under Windows7 64-bit, but worked like charmed under WinXP.

As soon as somebody writes an NFS module, Windoze and Linux will play together much nicer (at this point the only way to mount NFS is through Microsoft Windows Services for Unix suite, which is an absolute pain to use).

If you are like me, and have tens and tens of gigs of music, you understand the pain of keep everything sorted and with the right album art, especially when you use all sorts “smart” media players like Windows Media Player, that screw up your hand written ID tags.

This new free tool I found not only fills in missing info by matching preexisting tags, but also can compute a unique hash of your mp3 based on some proprietary algorithm. So you should be able in theory to tag mp3′s that are called “file1.mp3″

Well, today during of one of my usual weekend random internet wanderings, I stumbled across an awesome project that does just that and does it semi automatically. To top things, all files including the database is released under GNU (to be read free, costs nothing, zilch, nada).

I am talking about the guys at MusicBrainz. This is just a database containing lots of music meta-information uploaded by lots of people, pretty much they way FreeDB is for audio CDs. There are quite a few taggers that are able to get their information from this site, but I personally tried just two of them: EasyTag available for *nix and Picard available for Win/Mac/*nix (available on the MusicBrainz site). While EasyTag is “easier” to use, as all operations are automatic and the program makes all the decisions for you. From now on I will make an in depth presentation of Picard.

For some strange reason the default version of Picard can view Album Cover, but you cannot download any missing covers for your files. The downloading capability is enabled through an extra plugin available on the same site, Cover Art Downloader Plugin. Follow the instructions on how to install plugins and make sure you enable it.

For an quick intro on how to use Picard check out these two links: How to tag files with Picard and the screencast made by one of the authors:

The docs are quite decent but there are certain GUI elements which are not self explanatory. Every so often you will notice that a song has a musical note icon. This basically means that the file is missing from the album (file missing or assigned to another album). Other times there is a musical note but there are two items in the subtree. This means that it found two duplicate files that match same position in the album. This can be resolved by scanning the file to get it’s fingerprint since there certain albums which contain multiple tracks with the same Name (like different studio takes).

Picard has more or less two working modes: a very fast, but inaccurate mode that matches just ID tags which is triggered by clicking Lookup, and a slow and accurate mode that matches ID tags but also MP3 fingerprint (a unique ID that does not depend on tag codec used to encode, etc) that is somewhat slower but dead accurate.