(Phaysis)

This question goes out to all you librarians and taxonomists in my readership.

I have a large music collection, and I make every effort to keep all of my file tags as clean, correct and complete as possible. This allows me to easily search my collection and drill down to the artist, album, and song I demand to hear at that moment. If you’ve ever seen my CD collection, you’re aware of my meticulous arranging and sorting by certain criteria. The same is with my electronic collection. Physically, I prefer to sort by artist, then by album release date. Electronically, I can sort by any taxonomy I so choose. Easy enough.

So, going back to my library research orientation in my first year in college, I learned that books are sorted by subject, then by the author’s name, last name first, and then by book title. If the first word of the title is an article like “a”, “an” or “the”, it is moved to the end of the title after a comma and the book is sorted appropriately. So if I were to search for H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”, I would search in the fiction section under the author “Wells, H.G.”, then for “Time Machine, The” somewhere after “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This makes sense. If the author was a publishing group or authorship can’t be pinned to one author, then it would be sorted under the group name.

I do the same with my music collection. If the album is published under a band name, then it’s sorted alphabetically under the band name. Aerosmith would be sorted before Aphex Twin. But if the album is published under the artist’s name, then it’s sorted by the artist’s name, last name first. So Fiona Apple would be sorted between Aphex Twin and Apples In Stereo under Apple, Fiona. This makes sense.

When I first built my music collection, back when music software wasn’t so smart, I would manually put articles at the end of the album and song titles because the software could clump all of the “The”s together, etcetera. It’s a pain and a hassle to do it manually, and sometimes the “extra album info” features of the software would break because it didn’t recognize the album title, but I lived with it. Luckily, modern music software has gotten smart about the use of articles in the song and album titles and sorts appropriately in the music browser interface.

But the problem comes with the artist names, which I store in my particular, perfectly reasonable way according to my training and my experience with sorting physical media: last name, then first. However, the software doesn’t know that I’m listening to Fiona Apple; it searches the web for Apple, Fiona and finds no data to show. Just like the old days with the title articles, so it is with artist names.

So what do you guys do about this? Is saving the artist name as “Last, First” still viable, or is it a vestigial relic of an older technology? I like to sort by this method because it makes sense to me; I shudder to think about trying to scroll through a page of Michaels just to get to Michael Hedges. I don’t know, maybe doing the “Last, First” method is as obsolete in the electronic realm as typing double spaces after sentences; a complete necessity on technologies now rendered obsolete. Should I get modern and save artist names in the natural format? Most player software has a search box to allow me to jump straight to my desired songs, but I’d have to change my habits.

What’s your thought?

I suppose the downside to using FLAC as a codec for storing your music is that the file sizes are much, much larger than MP3. Based on my current statistics, each album will average around 340MB on disk, which seems like a lot but it’s not bad considering the Red Book Standard for CDs declares 700MB total capacity per disc.

Here’s a sample comparison between MP3 and FLAC using Rush’s album “Presto”. The MP3s were generated with the LAME encoder at 192Kbit, 44.1KHz, stereo. The FLACs were generated with the FLAC encoder, medium compression setting.

• MP3: 73282 bytes (71.5MB)
• FLAC: 342188 bytes (334.2MB)
• Overall storage growth: 467%

That extra quality comes at a cost. However, with the dropping prices of large hard drives, storage space becomes inconsequential.

The second drawback of using FLACs instead of MP3s is one of hard drive performance. With the smaller MP3 files, the audio player can read in the entire file and cache it in memory instead of hitting the disk constantly for the next data block to decode. FLAC players, unless they’re written to use a larger block of memory to cache the larger file, will have to hit the disk constantly throughout playback. You may run into situations, as I have, where the player will run out of audio data to send to the speakers if you’re doing something that’s creating extra disk activity. Saving files, copying files, anything to do with adding work to the disk may crowd the music player’s file accesses so it has to stand in line to read the data. This can be overcome with faster disks, larger caches, or smarter music players.

All that being said, I’m glad I’m switching to FLAC. I’m actually hearing the music clear as a bell, just as it’s mastered to the actual CD. All the little nuances, the sonic fluttering in the background, and tiny little noises in the studio, it’s all there. And FLAC, since it’s a perfect copy of the CD material, retains the aural phasing and panning between stereo channels, so if the material’s recorded to “come out of the speakers”, then it comes out of the speakers. MP3 processes all this and crunches it down aurally into only the important pieces of the sound and drops the rest.

It’s good to hear my music again.

So I got shown up.

I had the strange fortune the other evening to share my table in a crowded coffeeshop with an interesting woman. She needed a place to sit, she asked, I offered the other half of my table. I noticed that her laptop was festooned with a menagerie of Drupal stickers, Drupal being a website creation framework that I’ve looked at for my own needs but turned down on its apparent complexity.

“Strange,” I thought. “She’s a girl, and she apparently likes Drupal!” The chauvinist in me short-circuited for a minute as he tried to reconcile the fact that technically-minded women do exist. This is the modern age, mind you. “Well, then. That’s kinda hot.”

I tried to pay her no attention and keep to my side of the table, being a “nice guy” and all, but the opportunity arose and I had to break the fourth wall. Turns out she’s a marketing girl (a marketing girl!) and she’s fanatical about Drupal. “Full retard,” she said. Worked at several consulting firms that did projects in Drupal, and is now an independent marketing consultant, building sites and blogs for clients, doing SEO and all that Web2.0 stuff. As it happens, we know mutual acquaintances. This town is small, small.

So I confessed to her that I tried looking at Drupal for one of my sites (Glass Door), and found it hard to work with, and that I balked at the need to get my hands greasy in PHP code to customize the site to my likings. She gaffed at that idea, said that it’s so easy to work with. You just install, select your options, and bam it’s customized; no need to write a single line.

I’m humbled. If a non-technical marketing and sales person can grok something that I cannot wrap my head around, I’m doing it wrong. Sounds like I need a major mental reset.

So I’ve come to an internal agreement. Actually, it’s more like an admission of defeat. Either that, or it’s a sudden ability to see that the easist path has been plainly in front of me the whole time. Call it what you want, but I ain’t happy about it.

See, for the past eleventy-thousand years, I’ve been trying to build a website to showcase my music. After spending countless hours drooling, shit-for-brains, while staring at my laptop hoping to spontaneously grok everything I needed to do and write all the code to my own fluidly-custom specifications, I’ve given up. I’m stupid. So stupid, I’m gullible. I managed to convince myself that I had enough mental energy left over at the end of my workday to set up to the task of building a website from the ground up. How foolish I am!

So, having gotten half of a notion last summer to give up coding a full Ruby On Rails website, I decided to try some pre-rolled frameworks. I looked at Drupal and WordPress, among a few others. Since I already had some modicum of “experience” with WP, and since Drupal has a steep learning curve, I went with WP. And what did I discover? WP version 3 unleashed a new feature where you could make your own custom post types, so you can create a Song and have it display along with your regular Posts, Pages, and Attachments. “Astounding!” I exclaimed. “Just add my Song code and build a template, and I’m home, sweet mother of god, HOME!”

Herein, we shall call this moment The Second Great Con of the Man On Himself.

The problem, you see, is that WP 3.0 has half-assed support for custom posts. It doesn’t pull posts made from different types into feeds, doesn’t include them into the front page, doesn’t support archives. For that, you need a WP plugin developer’s mind, and the free energy, street smarts, and tenacity to navigate the byzantine WP wiki in the hopes of finding the help you need to make this happen. As it turns out, custom post types just aren’t user-friendly.

Since my job requires me to be task-based and results-oriented all day, every day, I just can’t summon up the smarts or desire it takes to actually make this stupid little dream of mine into a reality. When I’m settling down for my evening coffee, trying to unwind my head and get into my projects for the night, you know what I really want to be doing? Absolutely nothing. Now I understand the attraction to clicking on the TV and turning yourself off. I can’t do this anymore.

I lost my love for the web. Giving up. And now my task is much simpler. There are plugins for WP that allow me to stream media and set up podcasts. They make things on the back end much easier, but they are neither custom nor completely intuitive to use. That’s the tradeoff. And right now, I’m trading in my programmer’s hat for a dunce cap. The internet has won.

Hurp a derp.

(Just for the sake of remembering my own damn self — and maybe helping someone else.)

Earlier, I attempted to hibernate my desktop. Never done it in the 15 months I’ve had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on here, so I figured “Hell, why not?” I hit the dropdown, and the system commenced its hibernating shutdown action. But it neither shut off nor came back to life. I ssh’d into it to discover via the system logfile that the hibernate was halfway through its operations when the power daemon discovered “Oh Hell! There’s no resume device on this machine!” at which point it ceased and attempted to raise the machine from the dead.

After manually power-cycling the system, I did some digging. Turns out the UUID of the swap/resume partition had been changed somewhere along the way, so both /etc/fstab and /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume were stuck with the old UUID from way back when the system was installed. That UUID no longer exists.

I’m not sure what caused it to change; such an idea is disturbing, considering this is supposed to be the super-stable, LTS build of Ubuntu. The UUID of the swap partition is usually set with the mkswap -U command, and can be set on an ext2/ext3 partition with the tune2fs command. But anything can go wrong.

So. How to make fix? A quick check with sudo blkid will list the block devices on the system:

oldman@Deskie:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="c97b2e80-a5b2-4371-a60e-126a8d1402a5" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="f3a3cd16-f0c8-40a1-8a7d-578c57296c6b"
/dev/sda6: UUID="775a56e3-0244-453f-8d8a-fd1eb42a82f6" /
SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

The swap partition has the UUID f3a3cd16-f0c8-40a1-8a7d-578c57296c6b and is the device /dev/sda5. Copy and paste the UUID into the fstab and resume config files to replace the UUID that was there. Execute sudo swapon -a to mount your swap partition, and you should be golden. Verify with free -m to check for a nonzero swap size.

oldman@Deskie:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3962       1784       2178          0        154        660
-/+ buffers/cache:        969       2993
Swap:        11601          0      11601

The value 11601 tells me I’m gettin’ my swap on. Aw yeah.