Of course this ain’t the end of the world but it should worry everyone quite a bit. If you’re addicted to online music streaming, what are your other options? There are a few other good streaming sites available. The popular ones include 8tracks and Grooveshark, both of which has last.fm integration, i.e. scrobbling support.

The most noticeable improvement is the better playlist management options. It’s now even _fun_ to move the songs back and forth in the playlist. Now it’s possible to save custom playlists as well. There are improvements in the equalizer and there’s a Genre mode of which I’m not much of a fan. Perhaps it’s time to tag the missing genres in my library. That ain’t easy.

Note that the free version works for only 14 days. They’ve reduced the price of the unlock key now, at $2.

[sourcecode language=”python”]
#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import id3reader

rootdir = "/home/thameera/Music"
processed = 0
bad = 0

for thisDir, subdirList, fileList in os.walk(rootdir):
for fname in fileList:
if fname[-3:] == 'mp3':
processed += 1
fullPath = os.path.join(thisDir, fname)

try:
id3r = id3reader.Reader(fullPath)
except:
bad += 1
print "Error extracting id3 info from %s" % fullPath
continue

if None in (id3r.getValue('performer'), id3r.getValue('album'), id3r.getValue('title')):
bad += 1
print fullPath

print "%d MP3s processed. Found bad tags in %d of them" % (processed, bad)
[/sourcecode]

It uses the id3reader library to parse the tags. I don’t think it’ll work if you have files with other formats, like wma or flac.

This script can be further expanded to ignore certain directories, output only one entry per each directory that has bad tags, check for other tags as well, check if the artist tag does not match the name of the parent directory, etc, etc.

Babel, the new album, is pretty good, much like the previous one. I listened twice and it didn’t hit me like Sigh No More did, but still, Babel’s got that unique Mumford & Sons style and lyrics. According to Wikipedia,

… Babel debuted at number one on the UK Album Chart and the US Billboard 200. It became the fastest selling album of 2012 in the UK, selling over 158,000 copies in its first week, and was the biggest selling debut of any album in 2012 in the US, selling 600,000 in its first week.

That’s big. I’m having mixed feelings, but if you liked Sigh No More’s folk-rock, you won’t find Babel disappointing.

The first ORCA symphony will be performed by Serj on 28th October in Austria.

“I hate injustice, and I can’t help but speak against it,” he says. “But I don’t want to get involved in politics. I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.”