Software — GeekScribes

Category: Software

Music Recognition Service Roundup

May 24, 2010 by

Inf

I just saw the stats of Geekscribes and the article about the music recognition software Tunatic is leading in the number of views. Seeing how people are interested in such services, I decided to dedicate a post about other services of the same type that do work from a computer or are online services. Let’s start:

Update (05.08.10): Added Audiggle (#5)

1. Tunatic

I have already talked at length on this software now. Download and install it, plug in a microphone, record a piece of your unknown track via Tunatic and it’ll probably give you the track name and artist if they are in the database. The problem with Tunatic is that development seems to have stopped, as it can be seen from this line on Tunalyzer’s page: “NB: Tunalyzer should be available for the Windows platform in early 2007.”. Tunalyzer allows you to analyze your own known songs, and have them added to the Tunatic database.

It works for most songs I tested it on, but since development seems to have stopped, I don’t have much hope for the project getting new features.

Read the post about Tunatic on Geekscribes

2. Midomi

This one is a new service I’ve just discovered, but which I don’t use as it was meant to. Basically, it’s an online service where you go, and hum/sing some track you don’t know the details of. Maybe it’s a tune stuck in your head somewhere and you’d like the name. There’s a bar near the top part. So you click on it, hum the song in your microphone and it’ll almost certainly give you the track’s details. It worked for all tracks I tested, even some lesser-known tracks which surprised me. It’s also very fast in its identification.

Read the post about Midomi on Geekscribes

3. Audiotag

This service takes a different approach from the above two. Instead of recording a tune, you need to upload the track or some part of it to the service. You can use a variety of tools to do cut an MP3 track, for example, Mp3DirectCut which is free. After uploading the piece, which should be around 10-15 seconds minimum, it’ll give you the details you want.

I have not tested the service a lot since I would need to do a lot of cutting tracks. But I tested with two tracks, and both were recognized. One was fairly known, the other less-known with almost no lyrics.

Also, there are those facts mentioned in the footer: “recognized queries: 83453; DB size: 1327721 tracks, 96479 albums; last DB update: 4 days ago; added 23636 tracks, 1833 albums“, so I believe Audiotag is a reliable service.

Audiotag is good for people who do not have microphones, but the compromise is that you must have access to the digital track itself to be able to upload it. It doesn’t work for tunes you’ve heard on the radio or stuck in your mind, but it is good to identify that nice tune you downloaded off some site named “Track-01”. 🙂

4. Picard Tagger via Musicbrainz

Picard is not an identifier per-se. It’s a tagger. You give it access to your unknown tracks locally, and it will tag them (if possible) using data from the audio fingerprint database of Musicbrainz.

When tested, Picard was able to identify some tracks which didn’t have their tags. However, its use is slightly more complex than the 3 above services. The strength of Picard is that it can do recognition on its own without needing to record or upload things. It’s also cross-platform, providing Windows, OSX and Linux support.

You can download Picard here, and check out the docs of Musicbrainz that teaches you how to use it.

5. Audiggle

That one is relatively new to me. The website is clean and simple, so I hope the program is as nice. I immediately went and put it to test. I immediately noticed the .NET requirement. So much for portability. If you need that, Midomi’s for you. But let’s see Audiggle’s worth. Installation was a breeze. First thing, I had to set my Microphone. Problem is I have two Line-Ins for microphone, both listed as “Microphone” so I have no idea about which is which. A note about which microphone belongs to which sound-card would be nice.

Next… What? Registration? What the hell? This is an immediate turnoff for me. Why do I need to register to identify a track. Ok, maybe to track all my identified tracks. Lol. Ok let’s go through this pain. Fortunately, registration is quite fast. Okayyy. First try. Login… “Audiggle is down for maintenance.” Nothing on the website indicates this though. Alright, after 5 mins of retries, it’s still failing.

Guess it’s not ready for the lime-light yet. I’ll come back to it later. If you have more success than me, do leave a comment please!

Do you know a similar service, but which is not mentioned here? Please post it in the comments below!

P.s. There are many other recognition services not mentioned in this roundup. This is because most of them either require a mobile phone or mobile device of some kind (Shazam) or they require you to type notes on virtual keyboards (MusicPedia). These are not really intuitive to use in my opinion, so I shared only the most user-friendly and accessible-to-all services.

Windows 7: Solutions to can’t sleep problems.

March 2, 2010 by

Inf

Hello folks. Sorry for lack of recent posts. Been taken up with uni lately. Anyway, I have recently migrated to Windows 7. I have to say Microsoft has done a magnificent job this time, especially when I compare Win7 and Vista. Performance on Win7 is awesome. And there are lots of usability improvements, which makes 7 a very nice software.

However, I was having a problem: I couldn’t manually sleep my computer. If I did it from the Orb/Start menu, the screen would turn off, the PC would shut for like a millisecond, before starting back up, and prompting me for login.

Turns out there are a few things that can cause this error, and they are easy to troubleshoot. Try these steps if you are having the same problem as me.

1) Update your drivers.

This should be pretty obvious. An old driver might be causing an issue. So just update your drivers, specially for your video card and it should correct any problem. If it still doesn’t work, move on.

2) Try to see which requests are keeping the PC on.

Open a Command Prompt. You can do it by typing “cmd” from the Run menu, or simply open the Start Menu, and type “Command Prompt” in the “Search Programs and Files” bar.

Type this command: “powercfg -requests” without quotes. Then press Enter. You will see a list of programs that could be making requests. Windows Media Player is a usual culprit. Just close them, and it should work. If you have “None.” marked, move on.

3) A specific device is keeping the PC from sleeping

Still in the command prompt, type “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed”. You will see a list of devices that can wake up your PC. For me, I got my Network card, Keyboard and Mouse in that list. Turns out it was my mouse that was responsible for waking up the machine.

What to do? Simple: Go to device manager ( Start Menu – Control Panel (View by: Large Icons, top right) – System – Device Manager (left sidebar) ). Find your device that you think is causing the problem. For me it was the mouse, but I had to try disabling each individually. So, find your mouse in that list, e.g. Mice and other pointing devices, right-click it, choose Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck the box “Allow this device to wake the computer“.

Validate the windows with Ok, close Control Panel, and you should be all ok. Try sleeping your computer now.

That’s it for this small guide. I hope it helps you. Step 3 solved my problem. My computer now sleeps when I want it to sleep. 🙂

Clean Up Font Clutter with Font Frenzy

September 27, 2009 by

Inf

I’m the kind of dude that install fonts by the buckets. I like fonts, and I like variety in my creations. Also, some programs that I install tend to place their own fonts on my machine on their own. After a while, this creates a huge mess and your fonts list in your applications grows excessively long. If ever the applications you use have font preview, this makes the matters worse! I’ve had Wordpad and some other programs crashing on me due to some corrupt font, or some font they didn’t like while I was browsing the font list.

Also, apparently, having a ton of fonts installed can bring down the performance of your machine, so before installing that font pack with a zillion fancy fonts in it, you might re-consider. Though I have to say, I never noticed the performance hit myself, despite the 1067 fonts I had installed.

Thus, there comes a time in the life of every font freak, where they must clean up their fonts folder. The problem is that Windows has a set of fonts that it likes and cannot work without. I’ll call these system-critical fonts. If you delete those, you will have a brick of a machine on your hands, and a re-install of the OS could save it, but lot of pains involved. Thus you would want a way to clean up that font folder of yours while keeping the essential fonts, correct?

Here comes Font Frenzy! Font Frenzy is a free software that will allow you to preview what fonts you have installed, but also manage them. By manage, I mean, install new fonts, back up existing fonts and uninstall those you don’t want. All this in a very simple interface.

FontFrenzy

But the most interesting feature of Font Frenzy, something that I have not seen in other font managers, is the ability to “DeFrenzy” your font folder. What this does is uninstall all those non system-critical fonts that you have installed. Before doing that, it’ll prompt you to create a snapshot of your current fonts. I’ll explain what this does later. After that, it’ll “uninstall” all those unnecessary fonts by removing them from the OS’ font folder, and place them somewhere of your own liking. Thus, you have a backup of the fonts, but at the same time, they do not clutter. You can then pick and choose which ones to re-install at a later time.

Now about those snapshots. They are in fact saved states of your font folders. Using snapshots, you can easily add or remove sets of fonts. For example, I have a snapshot where I have “DeFrenzied” my whole font folder, returning my system to its default state. Then, when I need all my fonts back, I just “ReFrenzy” using that snapshot, and get all my fonts back. Likewise, you can have different snapshots for different installed font-sets. E.g. A set with only default+graffiti fonts for example.

Oh, if you still want to clean up the your font mess manually, this list should be helpful to know what NOT to delete.

Summarizing, the good points of Font Frenzy are:

Simple interface
Ability to remove non-essential or non-default fonts from a system automatically
Can restore all removed fonts via snapshots
Can manage fonts (install, delete)
Can backup fonts to a folder you like (Unload and Store) in FrenzyMan

The cons are:

ReFrenzy, DeFrenzy, FrenzyMan… these terms can be confusing to the new user, but you get used to them after a while.
DeFrenzy (remove all non-essential fonts) does not remove all non-essentials apparently. It does leave some fonts behind. I don’t know if they can be considered essential, but nevertheless, Font Frenzy does a decent job at cleaning up things.
If you check the Fonts folder in Windows, you will see that not all the removed fonts are gone from that folder. I think Font Frenzy just removes some entries from the registry for some fonts, so they look as if they are un-installed.

So I’d say, if you need a simple, but good font manager, give Font Frenzy a try.

Phased Upgrade of Windows Live Messenger 8.x

September 16, 2009 by

Inf

Hello folks, been a while, ain’t it?

This post will be about Windows Live Messenger – WLM. Call me oldstyle, but I liked the lightness of WLM 8.1. Hadn’t even bothered moving to 8.5.

What do I see today? I cannot connect to WLM because of a forced phased phorsed upgrade instruction from Microsoft to correct a security flaw that had cropped up. Now, I’ve finally decided to upgrade to WLM 2009 and I’ll give you my first impressions.

I think Microsoft has gone haywire. I want to download WLM and what I get is a bloated package of 135MB something with tons of apps that I don’t want. What the hell is that strategy? I refused to comply and searched for a Standalone Installer. Softpedia came to the rescue. The installer there is just WLM in a 24MB package. Much better.

Update: Note you may also need to install other files to get the standalone working, most notably contacts.msi to solve a 80x error message. These, and some info, are available at this MyDigitalLife post.

The installation goes smoothly. Nothing to complain here.

There are some issues with the new WLM 2009 which I don’t particularly like:

It’s bloated! 8.1 used to take 15MBish of RAM. 2009 takes 36MB! It’s not terribly bad, but I still like my applications slim.
The interface is weird. I’ve been taught that the eye reads from left to right. What the display pictures are doing in the left instead of the right is beyond my understanding. I’d think that the chat text is more important than the display pictures. That’s not what MS thinks apparently. Good thing is, you can hide the display pics like before.
Whenever I open any menu, there’s a lag where my PC freezes for a bit. I don’t know if it’s just me, or for everyone else too.

The good points are:

Probably more secured.
More customizable, specially for the layout and contact list. E.g. The size of the display pictures can be changed in the list.
Reworked color schemes. The color frames around the display pictures indicating status is a good idea.
Generally more organized and pleasing to the eye.
The interface, despite some weird points, is better. Moving the emoticons and other icons down the conversation box and removal of the send button, etc… saves space.
You can now display “What you are listening” and your “personal message” at the same time.
You can sign in from multiple computers at the same time, and sign off them remotely.

Most things are already updated to work with WLM 2009, like for those of you who use MessengerPlus, it’s already up to date.

That’s about it. I’m not terribly satisfied with the WLM 2009. I liked the 8.1 interface best, but I am forced to use 2009. Let’s hope it’s as good as 8.1.

Your views on this, if you use WLM?

Firefox 3.5 officially released: Reviewed!

July 1, 2009 by

Inf

Firefox 3.5 was officially released today, Tuesday 30th. The released candidate (RC) was available for a while back, but the version we are talking here is what I call the Final version, that is officially released.

If you haven’t done so already, go to Mozilla and download your copy. If you are lazy, you can try Help – Check for Updates directly in your Firefox 3. If you are already in RC, get the final! Got to show Internet Explorer 8 who’s the boss around here (and to stop MS from bragging any further)! Note that some of your addons will not work, such as Tabmix Plus, one of my favorites. Their forum have an updated beta copy, but for now, I downloaded alternatives (TabKit) to compensate. Do a backup of your stuff, if ever you want to restore.

Now is not too many upgrades to comment on, so I’ll just go on and review those I’ve seen worthwhile of mention. And some that operate in the background and that you will not see.

I have to start somewhere, right? So let’s see what changed in the immediate interface. You will see that Mozilla (now referred as ‘they’) have modified the tab bar to make it more like Chrome’s. Note that small + button near the tab? That’s your new tab button. It follows you now. Apart from that, not much to see in the main window. Looks mostly the same as Firefox 3.

Now the menus. All the menus are similar, save for the History and Tools menu. In History, you now have the option to undo closed tabs, but now, also closed windows. That’s pretty cool for people who use multiple windows. As for me, I prefer a ton of tabs rather than more than 2 windows at once.

In Tools, you will find the Private Browsing mode, or what we common folks call the “porn mode” – this is what it’ll be mainly used for. Legitimate use: accessing your bank account. Or so the “innocent” claim they use it for! 😛

Some other interesting features you might find interesting are:

Ripping out tabs: Drag a tab away from the tab bar and release. Voila, you now have a window, with that tab inside. Pretty cool way for creating new windows, rather than using File – New Window, copy-pasting the address and whatever. You can also drag out tabs, and put them in other existing windows. Well, you can do a lot of cool things with dragging tabs now. If you don’t want to drag, right-click and choose Open in a New Window for the same effect.

Firefox 3.5 is promoting porn mode or what? In the History sidebar, and some other places History-related, there is an option to “Forget about this site”. I’ll leave this one to your creative uses.

Tracemonkey was included. That means faster Javascript. Well, a lot of stuff Javascript-related faster. If you want the gory innards, check out Mozilla’s Tracemonkey Wiki.

Video and Audio HTML5 tags are now supported in-built. This will probably mean that sometime in the future, you’ll not need to install Adobe Flash or whatever other plugins to view video and have audio on websites. I can’t begin to imagine what crazy ideas developers will come up with to over-exploit those! Just wait and see.

AwesomeBar filters: You know what AwesomeBar is right? It’s the address bar, for those of you who don’t. Well, now when typing in it, you can filter what results it returns. It’s easy enough to use the filters. As for remembering the symbols, I can’t say the same. Who came up with those? I also gave you a way to remember those. My own personal method. E.g. Try “Geekscribes *” in the address bar without quotes.
- History only = ^ (Up symbol, like, from where you came previously. Assume you are navigating down something)
- Bookmarks only = * (The * symbol is on the 8 key, that looks like a B symbol. B for Bookmarks)
- Tagged Pages = + (+ for pages that I like)
- URLs only = @ (The @ symbol is used in email addresses. URLs are called addresses)
- Title/Tags only = # (That one I don’t know how to remember!)

You can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or bookmarks with *, or tagged pages with +. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type @, and for title/tags only use #.

Geo-location. Basically, now your browser knows where in the world you are. So when you are looking for pizzas in Google Maps, it’ll show you what’s closest to you. Haven’t tried that personally. I’m just scared of the implications. My browser knows from where I’m browsing porn! That’s so scary. It may even lead me to some unwanted locations (in the real world) to find what I’m looking for. I hope I’m joking, because seeing Google pointing me to the nearest porn would be awkward! 😛

Session restore improved. If ever your browser crashes, on the next restart of the browser, you are prompted to restore the previous session, complete with ticks to choose what tabs and windows to restore. That’s very nice of Mozilla. It’s directly there in the browser window, like one of those Pages not Found messages. You get the idea. Fortunately, I was able to recreate it by End Task’ing Firefox via Taskmanager.

Did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is fast? It’s amazingly responsive, and hardly lags. Memory usage is still quite too. 127MB for 5 tabs and around 20 addons installed. It also loads fast. Less than 2 seconds it seems.

Not much to say apart from that. I’ll leave the rest of the goodies for you to discover. After you go, come back here and give us some comments and opinions about Firefox 3.5! 🙂

(Some info taken from Lifehacker)

Internet Explorer 8 Lolz: Act 2

June 19, 2009 by

Inf

EDIT: (starts here)

More lies and debunking them! You really have to see those two links.

Among the most interesting ones:

“Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.”

Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s test cases than any other browser.

Can’t Microsoft be prosecuted for spreading lies like that? It’s almost offensive to web-developers!
(ends here)

I recently mentioned that Internet Explorer and Microsoft were afraid of other browsers. Remember that 10k competition thing?

Well, Microsoft has done it yet again! Only this time, it’s a lot more funny and weird. And the amount of lolz just got way higher! See for yourself! And the Digg source.

Line by line comments follow after the shot:

Now the comments:

Yeah right. IE is more secured than both Chrome and Firefox. I wonder where all those vulnerabilities come from. All those ActiveX nasty stuff. Yeah. IE is indeed secured.
In-Private browsing? Ever heard of Chrome’s Incognito mode? Firefox’s new Privacy mode? Or what we call “the porn mode”? Another set of ticks missing here!
IE is easy to use? Since when? Accelerators? Try SmarterFox. Chrome is fast enough as is!
At least they got some humility to say that Firefox 3 is better. But still, I doubt IE8 is better at standards. Remember that ACID3 test?
Developer Tools? I dunno. Can’t comment. But I know nothing beats Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar combined!
Reliability. Firefox will soon have tab/process management, don’t worry IE. Chrome already has it.
Customizability: Many of the things I want? Right out of the box? Gimme the features of a fully-featured RSS reader directly in IE (Brief?). Or coloured tabs (Colourful Tabs). Or a powerful download manager (DownThemAll). I can even write my own, or customize existing ones! Stop hating Firefox, MS! Give some love to the Fox!
Compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser? For real? And that ACID3 test again? And the non-respect of standards?? Don’t make me laugh! Opera is the best in compatibility imho!
Manageability: What do they mean here? I can’t understand.
Performance: Why isn’t Safari here? I heard it’s the fastest of them all.

Overall, IE is bluffing. But hey, more lolz for us! Who are we to complain? I’d so like to see Firefox 3.5 soon. Hey, why not Firefox 4? Let’s see IE fight that! 😛

Seems TechCrunch is poking some fun at IE8 too!

So long!

Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

June 19, 2009 by

Inf

I am currently using Firefox, latest version that is 3.0.11 at the time of writing, and I encountered a strange problem on some sites, one of which is the famous Smashing Magazine. The headings were displayed using weird characters, or what it would seem, special characters. You can see a screenshot below.

At first, I thought it was a problem with character encoding. Changing to UTF-8 did not solve the problem, nor did switching off Auto-Detect from View menu – Character Encoding solve anything. Well, basically, after a lot of trying out solutions, it was not a problem with charset or encoding.

I tried other solutions but none seemed to work. One of them gave me a clue as to what the problem is. It was going to Tools – Options – Content – (Fonts & Colors) Advanced – (uncheck) “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”. This rendered all pages without custom fonts, except my default of Times New Roman. The problem was solved.

The workaround indicated that the problem resided with my fonts. I thus went and checked out the website source and the stylesheet and found out that Smashing Magazine uses Helvetica font as primary font for h2 tags. This line was found in the source and stylesheet respectively (I shortened the code with …’s):

<ul class="topic-list">
<li>
<h2><a...> ... </a></h2>

ul.topic-list h2{font:44px Helvetica,Arial, ...}

If you don’t know, Helvetica is a proprietary font and doesn’t come with installs of Windows by default. It didn’t come with mine, on both my XP and Vista installs, so I’m assuming it doesn’t come by default.

The Solution:

So what can you do? Apparently, nothing. You cannot acquire the Helvetica font for free and install it. Unless you are willing to pay for it, you are stuck.

Now, if you are crafty enough, you can use some Google powers and try to find the font by… let’s just say, alternative means. I am not posting links here, because I do not encourage piracy. I managed to find a copy of Helvetica somewhere, installed it and problem was solved. You can see the results below.

If you do want to do what I did, you just need to find a copy of Helvetica from somewhere, install it, restart Firefox and the problem should be solved.

Another plausible solution would be for sites with such problems to substitute their fonts for those people do have on their machines. But we cannot require this from site designers. Another way would be to be able to find an addon or similar for Firefox that would allow for font substitution. If you know of such a solution, you are free to share it with us.

A bit of strangeness here is that, since Firefox did not find Helvetica on my machine, it should have used Arial. I cannot understand why it did not.

If you do install the Helvetica font and still get the problem, maybe it’s another font being used and that you don’t have.In this case: check the website source, find which element it is, search the stylesheet for that element, find which font it is and install the font. Restart Firefox, and the problem should be solved.

Hope my solution helps. That’s it! Kinda easy, wasn’t it?

Note: I uninstalled Helvetica after I tested the solution, for those of you who were interested! 😛