Monday, August 27, 2007

MP3-Geek
Last time, I posted about how Wal-Mart has made it as easy to buy music that will play on my computer as it would be to steal the same music. Now that I've bought a few albums (Seventh Day Slumber, Rebecca St. James, and Britt Nicole), I do have one complaint. The ID3 tags in the MP3 files leave something to be desired. ID3 tags are part of the music file that contain information about the song like artist, title, album, track number, etc. In the Seventh Day Slumber album, they were non-existent, for the other two, there was a bunch of stuff missing. This causes a problem because the software that loads these songs on my iPod uses this information to make it possible for me to find the music when I want to listen to it.
So the solution was to select "Add/Remove..." in the Applications menu of Linux, and find a free program that can help me modify my recently purchased files. One of the ones that I found was EasyTag, and it is excellent! EasyTag parses the filenames, and automatically fills in the ID3 tags for all the songs that I purchased from Wal-Mart.
Now I have all my new music on my iPod, and I couldn't be happier.

BTW, I'm really impressed with the Britt Nicole album!

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Music-Geek
Finally, I can buy music online!
OK, you might be thinking that purchasing music online has been around for years, but when you consider that I am using an iPod and Linux, that's not so true. Up until now, the only way to buy music was through iTunes or a similar "store" that only sold DRM'd song files. Then even when iTunes started selling some of their music without DRM, I was still left out because there is no iTunes application for Linux. (Of course it has been dead simple to get music at no-cost online, but I really do consider that stealing. How can it be easy to steal, but hard to pay for a product?!?) But now Wal-Mart has come to my rescue with their musicdownloads.walmart.com store. I can download tracks right from my web browser and now they play on my iPod, my computer, and my CD MP3 player!
It is amazing to me that it has taken this long for a retailer to finally start collecting my money!
I'll be enjoying the latest Seventh Day Slumber album now. . .

Oh, I almost forgot; the Wal-Mart store says it requires Windows, and it turns out that it will refuse to work with Firefox, but thanks to some advice from a guy on /. I installed the Epiphany browser, and that worked fine.