your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

The Unarchiver is what you need.

Revive for the Snow Leapord world, I guess. Anything newish of interest kicking around?

defcon screen saver no longer works. horse anus.

loving Click2Flash. Makes the internet faster and less annoying, and easy to load flash when you need/want it.

sounds cool

yeah, flash loads as a blank gray box, and you just click on it to load it...or click the pulldown to select to load all flash videos for the page, or add the page to always load flash.

Just read a recommendation for Song Sergeant when it came to cleaning up music files -- as I'm approaching the end of a massive library project I'm thinking this might be plenty helpful. Anyone used it, or can recommend similar?

have not used it but recently downloaded a similar program called Dupin. It's on that Doug's iTunes Scripts page:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php

but isn't a script but an app. I tried it for a second and gave up. In the end I just can't bring myself to remove dupes half the time because if one song appears on two different releases/compilations, I don't want to mess with the integrity of a particular release. Not because I'm anal but more because sometimes I'd think to look at that artists releases and other times I'm searching by the compilation. For instance, I have all this stuff for when I DJ weddings and I may have a song on the Atlantic R&B box set, but then I also have it on the greatest hits of that particular artist, and I hate the idea of looking at the box set and missing songs because I deleted dupes!

it's so frustrating.

yeah itunes should allow the same file to have multiple sets of metadata for exactly this reason.

honestly i think that approach would make things even more confusing, though i get the gist. for albums i can understand wanting them complete, but for comps is it really worth the effort? even so, might as well just leave it be, hard drive space is plentiful nowadays, unless you have like 5 copies of the same song

I have probably ten copies of "Soul Finger". But it's not storage that's the problem, that's true; it's my OCD desire for a cleaner library and thus a pretty minor matter for me.

Soul Finger. Exactly. The wedding DJ library has made this really brutal for me, but everything else. Some comps are really crucial and you think, "I want to listen to No New York" or "Wanna Buy A Bridge".

But practically speaking the comps are worth the effort because that's how you may organize stuff. I may think, I need some soul classics and instead of going to all the different artists, I remember that Atlantic set.

I don't know that it would be so confusing to be able to have one copy of a song, and in the metadata select multiple albums, but I have iTunes organizing the songs into folders based on the metadata, so that would probably make my mac explode.

i want dan to dj my wedding but i'm never getting married :(

but I have iTunes organizing the songs into folders based on the metadata

oh god no

that works if you do it right

ya why... not

I just don't give a shit what goes on in the Music folder; it's like caring about what's in Safari's cache folder to me.

dan if the song appears twice in itunes with difft metadata in each case i don't thonk dupin will erase anything. it only deletes entries w exactly the same metadata (i think)

"dupin" reminds me of LL COOL J in the movie TOYS

I spent the whole summer DJing weddings. Now I'm taking a break because of 2 or 3 other jobs. And just as it was winding down I finally finished the "music" part of my personal website (danselzer.com) that was built with the idea of finding cool wedding gigs. I'm not totally against doing more, depends on the client, the money, the time, etc.

But I built this amazing wedding library. Most DJs who do it digital use Serato or Traktor (or something similar). I didn't have a laptop and I bought two CDJ400s, Pioneer's "cheaper" dipping of the toes in digital media. The usb ports only read PC formated USB stick and the files can only be sorted by file name, NOT metadata, and they only read mp3s, not WAVs.

So I use Max:
http://sbooth.org/Max/

and I think by getting away from iTunes it helped me make a really concise and tidy library. What'd I do is get music from allover (iTunes, CDs, vinyl, rapidshare, etc) make playlists, then just drag all the songs out of iTunes into a "to file" folder. Then I'd drop all the songs in Max which would convert everything to 192 MP3s and rename every file to Artist-Song.mp3 based on the ID3 tags.

I then organized those songs into various genre folders, with 30 to 80 or so songs in each folder, and dropped everything onto matching high end 8 gig Cruzer thumb drives.

The two CDJs and my mixer (Rane) are in a coffin with a built in power strip so I just plug power into the back, stick in the two thumb drives and have 1400 songs. Every single time I did a wedding I brought back-up CDs and burned new CDs of the specific new requests for each couple, in case something happened with the USB sticks, but I never resorted to that.

This wasn't as much work as it sounds like. Would it have been way easier to put everything on a MacBook and control it with Serato or Traktor? Yeah. hell, the CDJs I have control Traktor natively via USB, you don't even need the audio control CD. But the coffin still weighs a lot. I'd like to bring just a macbook and a simple controller/soundcard. There's a few out now but they're junk. Even the Vestax VCI-300.

A lot of work to play "It Takes Two" to some grandparents.

oh, and it's really cool to just spin this little knob to select songs and not look like you're checking your email.

any good freeware/shareware/cheap disk burning utilities? Had Toast years ago. Cracked then paid for. Fine using the finder but needed to dupe a CD and have to go through this whole Disk Utility Disk Image nonsense. Downloading "Burn" now. Any good? What else?

Burn's good stuff! Does what I need it to.

I used to have an external CD burner, man was that the good life. Still do but it's just too much to leave it plugged in and taking up space for the once every few months I need to dupe a cd.

Time Machine just saved my life for the first time. I went to look at an older Acute CD's folder and it was gone, all traces of it. So if I ever needed the artwork or needed to repress it or release it on vinyl etc, it was all history. I must've accidently deleted it at some point. I entered Time Machine, went back a few months and there it was, 8 gigs of stuff.

Wow. It took them THIS long but they finally did it - Firefox 3.6 beta has fullscreen mode. ABOUT DAMN TIME. Really sweet that it actually works and pretty well too, hides all the tabs, toolbars, menus and dock.

i've gone hoonja crazy. Doing a lot of cleanup to make things faster, then ruining it by downloading all kinds of things.

Mailplane is an app that makes gmail an application. It's only real benefit is to have gmail running and not being part of a browser so you don't accidently close the tab.

In that spirit, Fluid is an application that takes ANY website, and turns it into it's own application just like Mailplane. I've used it for my google calender.

Jumpcut is a little app/script that records everything you paste into a clipboard. I know I'll use this because I'm always frustrated by copying a URL or something then copying something else and wanting to go back to the thing I had just copied. This puts a list of all the stuff you've copied in your menu bar.

Hulu desktop, an app for accessing Hulu. Just a clean interface and a nice way to avoid using a browser.

Omni Disk Sweeper, a column style finder browser that lists things by size, a real easy way to see what's taking up tons of space on your harddrive.

And on the hardware side, as I mentioned on one of the other Apple threads, I have one more hard drive then my Mac can handle, but I found the Pro Caddy, which allows me to install a 5th hard drive in place of my second optical bay on my Mac Pro. Pretty hardcore.

Now to actually get some work done.

and I think by getting away from iTunes it helped me make a really concise and tidy library. What'd I do is get music from allover (iTunes, CDs, vinyl, rapidshare, etc) make playlists, then just drag all the songs out of iTunes into a "to file" folder. Then I'd drop all the songs in Max which would convert everything to 192 MP3s and rename every file to Artist-Song.mp3 based on the ID3 tags.

so you transcode mp3s to 192kbps mp3s?? or do you only convert from lossless? because that would be crazy. also isnt 192 a bit low?

For an alternative to OmniDiskSweeper, Disk Inventory X is pretty cool.

If you're keeping the originals for home listening, 192 is presumably plenty for a PA.

Mailplane is an app that makes gmail an application. It's only real benefit is to have gmail running and not being part of a browser so you don't accidently close the tab.

what are the advantages of using something like this over mail.app?!?!

i don't use either very often, but they're quite different. gmail is better at a couple of things (search, keyboard navigation) and some people prefer tagging and starring all the way to muss and fuss with folders.

and gmail's imap interface is just an interface to a subset of gmail's features. using gmail over imap in any regular client (mail, thunderbird, whatevs) can't reproduce the full gmail functionality.

would love to see mail.app get some real attention (to do lists don't count) and see it rethink email from the ground up like gmail did, rather than just be a better-but-buggier thunderbird.

gmail is better at a couple of things (search, keyboard navigation)

i don't use the latter, but whenever i have to find something i end up going to gmail

as mentioned, it's not that I love the gmail interface so much, but I'm used to it, and it helps me to keep it separate from mail.app. It's all a bit confused really. My main email is at yahoo but I also have gmail. Then I have info and dan at acuterecords which was set up as POP and is accessed by both mail.app and gmail.

I've been searching for an ideal situation...what I'd like is a desktop app that is sync'd to webmail and an imap account, but with my URL. When I've tried imap between mail.app and gmail, suddenly mail.app is really slow.

The main problem with gmail is that it only accesses my pop addresses once every 40 minutes and you can't change that and you can't even click "get mail" for other accounts without going into the program's settings. A total pain.

Fluid is really amazing though. I've made these basic web applications for google calendar and yahoo mail, so now they exist as applications and I don't have to juggle them with tons of browser windows.

one thing that i love about mail.app is its search - that you can search by from - to - subject - entire text - whatever. can't do that in gmail and i use it ALLLL the time.

searching from:name works for me in gmail

I just love the speed of mail.app, which is why I'd love to use a desktop app thats perfectly sync'd with webmail. I've tried all kinds of things but I've had trouble setting up an imap account that gmail and mail.app would get quickly and sync perfectly.

I haven't had any trouble with imap gmail and mail.app. For the record.

it basically works, but my problem is in adequately accessing a third account.

dan, cant you get google accounts on acuterecords? thats what i do for my domain name

& then it just syncs the same way gmail does

yeah, if you like the gmail way of doing email that is probably the way to go

I don't love the gmail way but that makes sense, you mean using the google apps standard or premiere to have @acute replace @gmail, then I can give gmail control over the mail servers or whatever for my domain, thus getting emails right away instead of some bullshit check every 40 minutes pop check thing?

Then have gmail imap sync with my desktop mail.app?

So then I'd tell mail.app to stop downloading those directly to avoid duplicates? I don't know why it's all so complicated.

I prefer mail.app's interface the best, then Yahoo, then gmail.

just used automator for the first time... pretty useful, actually!

I don't love the gmail way but that makes sense, you mean using the google apps standard or premiere to have @acute replace @gmail, then I can give gmail control over the mail servers or whatever for my domain, thus getting emails right away instead of some bullshit check every 40 minutes pop check thing?

yeah exactly. i use dreamhost so google apps is free but its super easy to set up and run and the imap works as well as regular gmail imap does w/ mail.app. and yeah id stop the pop3 setup so you can just have your imap acct

i just have so many accounts, I even set up a danselzer @ acute imap account months ago but stopped it right away, turned it on again last night to see how I could sync it and immediately started getting spam to mail.app! I don't think I ever used that address anywhere. My web host has the worst interfaces and online support. I'll have to call them to figure some of this stuff out.

i have faith that itll all work out for you dan

im worried tbh!

you should be worried. This is not happening. Firstly, I can't even set up a basic imap address that works right and syncs right, even without gmail. But mostly I'm scared to switch my MX records to point to gmail to access new IMAP mail accounts on google apps because what will happen with the old POP accounts? Should I kill the POP accounts and replace them with IMAP accounts with the same name? Will mail.app then delete all my old emails?

oh god i knew this would happen