Courtesy of Velocity Rewards

Posted on Thursday 17 May 2007

One of the upsides of too much travel is frequent flier points.  They’re normally fairly useless given that they put you on the red-eye and / or make you book so far in advance that you can’t even be sure what’s going to be happening, but not all programs suck.  International travel’s always pretty OK (even if you do have to leave at 3 am), and Virgin’s Velocity Rewards program actually has a real shop where you can trade in your points for free stuff (unlike Qantas, which has a shop but basically gives you a 10% discount in exchange for your points).  As in, stuff like this:

2361 2368

So, I got a free iPod Nano 4 gig.  It’s not bad - I’m reasonably impressed with it so far.  Actually, that’s not fair - I love the hardware, I’m just not that impressed with iTunes.  I can see where it’s going, and the podcast management kicks ass over Creative’s Zencast equivalent, but again, it’s almost totally metadata driven.  Yes, it’s possible to create playlists and manually manage your music, but it’s bloody time consuming and difficult.  The metadata / tag driven approach makes a lot of sense - just catalog everything you’ve got, then sync it to your hardware and you’re good to go.  You can browse by artist, album, year, or whatever you want.  Makes total sense.

Unfortunately, most of my music isn’t tagged.  I didn’t bother when I ripped it - I simply used a directory structure to keep track of everything.  Rather than have everything neatly organised by metadata, I have a file system that like this:  Artist / Year - Album / TrackNumber - TrackTitle.  It makes it very easy to find stuff through the file system, but it’s totally useless for stuff like iTunes, as I never entered the metadata.  And, going back through and updating everything isn’t much fun.  On the bright side, I’ve found the best program ever for this kind of stuff - MP3 Tag Studio.  I actually found it a few years ago, but it’s still the best out there - it not only allows you to directly edit the tags, it’ll also let you recursively enter tag information by using rule-based file name interpretations.  So, you define what the filename should look like, and it’ll pull the appropriate bits out of the filename and populate the relevant metadata.  Nice.

Still, it’s a nice piece of hardware - I’m quite impressed.  I still like my Creative Zen Vision W and use it most days at work as my jukebox, but they each fill a very neat little niche.

No comments have been added to this post yet.

Leave a comment

(required)

(required)


Information for comment users
Line and paragraph breaks are implemented automatically. Your e-mail address is never displayed. Please consider what you're posting.

Use the buttons below to customise your comment.


RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI