There are times when I persist in the most random things. Sometimes it’s productive; other times it betters my life in no significant way. What I’m about to show you is very handy, but the amount I spent tinkering on it didn’t save me too much effort. Well, it actually did shape up 20,000 of my mp3s in an automated fashion so it was not futile. The geek in you will enjoy some of the techniques, and laymen will have some upper-level tools to clean up and fix tags.

Quick Links

If you are impatient, jump to what you need:
- Trim Trailing/Preceding/Extra Space
- Spacing…(Proper, Amount)
- Title Case (It’s a Smart Conversion)
- Namings (O’Brian, McCarthy, MacDonald)
- DJ, vs., MC, EP, CD, XVI. (Upper Case)
- Contraction- Add Apostrophe’s (Can’t, let’s)

* Download All (zip) or Right Click>Save individual .mta file.
Instructions:
1. To locate the mp3tag actions directory, click “OpenActionsFolder.bat” from the zip file or find %appdata%\Mp3tag\data\actions in your user’s “Documents and Settings” folder.
2. Copy the “.mta” files you downloaded into that folder
3. To use them, open Mp3tag and choose the Action Groups in the toolbar- “[Aa] button,” Alt+5, or Menu>Convert>Actions.

Before we start

First off, you should know that Mp3tag is a must for a music tagging aficionado. Hands down best freeware for id3/tag manipulation. One of the best features is Web Sources, which’ll lookup album info (after it’s been encoded to your preferred music format) from a variety of databases (freeDB, amazon, and many others you can add).

Secondly, you can automate tagging from the filename. Let’s say your mp3 is called “06 You Make Me Feel Like Dancing (1976).mp3” and your album needs tagging. Below the programs menu bar is a button that transforms filename->tag. This can format your results by entering “%track% %title% (%year%)” and all you need to do is add the artist and album afterward. Flexibility is a blessing here. Also the same procedure can be done with an external file. If you have a text file with a list of song titles or a log of taggable info separate by lines, you can add them to several mp3s (in the order they appear in mp3tag). Keep Reading the Rest…

Al Perry is an older musician with an alt. country sound, and some mp3s are available at last.fm. Out of the 4 available for download, “Abnormall” seems like a nice one. If you are adventurous or like your music loaded with electronic psychedelia, you might like the other free mp3s.

I don’t know why I’m posting this other than the potential this could have. DRAM looks like an awesome resource for any fan of American music. Listen to unlimited CD quality recordings, view complete liner notes, and educate yourself on lesser known music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies from Earl Hines to interpretations of Miles Davis songs. The drawback is you need to be enrolled in a subscribed college to get access to all of this. Chances are there are no students willing to share their passwords either. I guess the thousands of songs will stay locked from the public…

About 20 mp3s are offered at Tuneresource.com supplying ancient folk, jazz, and blues before your day. If you can get past the annoying flash sound that loads on every page, you should see downward on the page (below the search box in the center) a drop down menu titled Free MP3 Tunes! with jazz and folk containing a small collection of good songs, and a single number listed under blues. I highly recommend Uncle Dave Macon and Woody Guthrie singing “We Shall Be Free.” It sounds like Woody’s playing with Cisco Houston and/or Lead Belly. I don’t know if they rotate their free downloads, but if you’ve been here before let me know if the freebies change.

No registration is needed to quickly download these mp3s. That’s for purchasing digital music that isn’t offered for free. I haven’t bought anything here, but there seems to be a hefty selection of old blues if you’re interested. Otherwise you can browse through my list of early folk, blues, and jazz sites that won’t cost a cent.

Can’t go to sleep? Want to be in bed earlier, but it’s impossible? I know what it’s like. I can usually stay asleep, but initiating sleep at the right times is a hassle sometimes. Whether for school or work or peace of mind, we all need rest that is compatible with our schedules. It’s common to break out of a sleep cycle even if it’s not jet lag. We are not equipped with a body that strictly follows the earth’s rotation that makes day and night. We can be in better tune with appropriate sleep habits with a handful of potential aids.

Dietary Tips

Tryptophan is an amino acid that aids in sleep with increase brain levels of serotonin and/or melatonin. Melatonin is a natural hormone that manages your circadian rhythm. Turkey is the most common suggestion for tryptophan, but other meats contain it as well. Even milk contains small traces of it, as well as calcium, which supposedly helps the brain use the tryptophan to manufacture melatonin. Melatonin also comes in a supplement. If you are to take it for the first time, use a small quantity (Even split the pill if you can).

Another thing to think about is Thanksgiving Dinner. Wikipedia argues that turkey alone will not make you drowsy, but the feast of carbohydrates in addition to turkey is what makes the difference.

Avoid large amounts of sugar and caffeine, especially during the hours before your planned bedtime. This is common sense to stay away from uppers or stimulating ingredients late at night, although there are some who can go to sleep right after a double-shot of espresso.

Proactive Methods

Adjust your bedtime forward or backwards. If you are going to bed at 4 in the morning and are in a hurry to be an early bird, you could pull an all nighter (stay up past 4a.m.) and crash as late as you can. If you are good at staying up, then you should be able to stay up until early evening. I have a ridiculously hard time getting to sleep earlier than the previous day so I like going forward. While I don’t consider myself diseased, I probably qualify for having a delayed sleep-phase because I could strive on a 26-30 hour day.

Prepare for downtime. This may mean you have to leave the party early to give yourself a block of time to cool off. Try to feel relaxed, think of stress-free things, and do whatever winds you down. Some ideas include yoga/stretching, praying, and meditation.

Turn off bright lights (dim your computer if you must be on it). If this is not possible (maybe the sun is already up), cover your eyes with a bandanna or get an eye mask (it’s in the travel section of the store) that blocks out light.

Turn off sounds, unless they are low and soft. Get earplugs if there is uncontrollable noise, or drown out loud roommates with soothing post rock.

Sync your brain waves into sleep. Hypnotize yourself into relaxation. If you don’t fall for that stuff, just condition yourself to to be calm by relaxing all your muscles (mentally go down your whole body) and “think” tiredness, but don’t think too hard. Quietly drift with binaural beats that induce sleep waves. I recommend mind-numbing freeware SBaGen (requires headphones for stereo effect).

Try to maintain consistent sleep habits. Waking up at the same time each day is beneficial for continuity. Repetition reinforces your schedule. While this is the only thing that Steve Pavlina suggests, it is the end result and not a tool to reach it. It’s like asking “How do I become an early riser?” and get an answer “Rise early!” I for one cannot get over a bad sleep schedule by this alone. In many cases, it is not plausible. Here’s an example of a troubled sleeper:

Dave Brubeck wants to start waking up at 6 a.m. daily. He just played a concert and gets Jack in the Box at 2 in the morning. He has a television interview at 6am. He should wake up at 5am. He manages to make the interview but he feels groggy. He wants to take a nap afterwards but the bumpy tour bus is not conducive to sleep. He is hungry and grabs a salad from a truck stop. Although not feeling refreshed, he has a second wind of energy as time goes by and it is 8pm. He has no concert today. Despite this he stays up late again, going to bed at 3am. He still wants to wake up at 6am. This time he wakes up at 6 a.m., but falls asleep while eating his egg and hash browns around 7:30. His manager wakes him at 10 a.m. and takes him to the studio to rehearse. He goes to sleep at 4am. This time, he sleeps through his alarm, his band blasting the radio, and a California tremor. He finally wakes up at 12 noon. He gets a restful eight hours of sleep recommended by doctors, discouraged by Mr. Pavlina. He has had a nice day and the night is passing. He is still up at 6am and figures he might as well stay up. There is no way for him to function the whole day. He passes out at 1pm and rises at 8 p.m.. He is nosediving through Steve Pavlina’s advice. He is already up when his alarm chimes. It is rendered useless. It does not help him be an early bird. There are 2 main problems here. Getting less sleep to follow the alarm does not necessarily make you tired enough to go to bed earlier. Conversely, setting up an alarm for an hour does not mean you’ll stay up for long enough to have a late enough bedtime. His commenters are also heavy with criticism.

Exercise can go both ways hindering and inducing sleep. I end up staying up later and become restless even after strenuous activity. In order for exercise to benefit me, I have to be active early- at least 8 hours before I want to go to sleep. Others will crash if they go on a night run.

A friend of mine pointed me to a site of underground songs of Elliott Smith. As some unreleased tracks later came out on official products, some other rarities have been cut to stay out of RIAA’s way. There is a heaping helping of mp3s waiting for enthusiasts of this guy all for free. I admit I don’t have much experience with Mr. Smith (I don’t have any o’ his records). For some reason I link this guy with Jeff Buckley. They both died, Jeff found missing while in a river and Elliot of alleged self-inflicted knife stab to the chest. Jeff- 1997; Elliott- 2003. Their sounds aren’t identical, but most compatible. I also don’t have any Buckley records. I only know about them both from casual listens and reading about them. So there’s also a personal connection I make due to the distance of my admiration. Funny thing is I’m not crazy about both of them, but I don’t mind their sound either. I haven’t heard enough of Elliott Smith to make a decision just yet.

The demos are average quality from the site. Each file is zipped individually so you have to unzip every file (which is a hassle unless you have a download manager and an archive unzipper that can handle batch extraction).

Being a slightly picky person when it comes to music tag metadata in my files, I haven’t found a great way to original release year OR recorded year for a compilation or non-standard album. For instance, I got a Sufer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim combo disc and it was fairly easy to figure out the original release year for each album. It would be virtually pointless to tag the year the hybrid disc was produced. It’s the MUSIC that I care about, not the manufacturing of the reissue or remastered edition. Even albums with bonus material should be tagged with first release in mind. The actual bonus material is up to debate whether or not to tag it when it finally gets released or the same period of recording.

There are three potential dates: date written, date recorded, date product is made. I personally like recorded date for historical relevance.

While allmusic.com is a great resource and will usually tell you the year a song appears on the original album, reliability falls apart once we precede the album era or unreleased songs. Take Woody Guthrie… He’s got a Dust Bowl Ballads album recorded in 1940 for a 3-78rpm set. In later was reissued on Buddha in 1964. This is easy enough to describe as 1940. Although I’ve heard and check this out from the library, I don’t own this. I recently caught The Ultimate Collection double-disc of 51 songs from Prism Leisure for a mere $1 (I’m not saying where I found this; it was the last one at that price anyhow)! While this is a real deal thanks to Euro-lack-of-copyright, there isn’t much documentation other than faulty liner notes and mention of companions who play on some of the individual tracks (Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston). Not even a hint of what year each song came out, [Sheesh]. I can guess from my knowledge of Guthrie that the songs range from 1940 to 1947 and possibly later. I can assume all Dust Bowl Ballads tunes are from the same session in 1940.

If you’re lucky, iTunes will accurately yearify a compilation by main date per song. I was and am out of luck with this one. Usually if I don’t have immense interest in exact year I’ll leave it blank, but I do like to use year for playlist and sorting purposes sometimes. In cases like this, I’ll guess and overestimate. So I’ll place the Dusty songs at 1940, and if I’m ambitious I’ll search each song I’m unsure of. As I don’t want to waste a couple hours on 51 songs, I’ll put 1947 on those I’m clueless of. I did start a inch of research that “This Land is Your Land” was penned in 1940, but recorded in 1944.

Further findings:
- What others think should be used for the year id3tag

and…

I particularly make an effort on any tracks going into the Core collection to make sure their year is correct. For studio albums, it’s easy but it’s a pain for Greatest Hits albums.

I have not found an automated way of fixing the year yet. Let me know if you find one!
[source]

I can’t believe there is no easy way around this. I’m not the only one.

I’m a sucker for old music. It can be folk. It can be blues. It can be gospel. I’m not too picky, although I can get tired of Billy Murry, acoustic era skits, and unoriginal popular oldies.

WFMU is a diverse radio station that also delivers free podcasts through the internet. Mp3s are available for I think two weeks (it’ll automatically download if set in iTunes [Insert into iTunes from menu: Advanced>Subscribe to Podcast]) Most shows are streamable with Real after two weeks. Here’s a list of some of the programs that offer some older variety of music (some include a mix of new music as well).

Sinner’s Crossroads with Kevin Nutt

Page + Podcast
“Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs.” Get your gospel fix here from all sides of America. The Christian infomercials are just hilarious.

Antique Phonograph Music Program

Page + Podcast
“Pop, standard, and ethnic music acoustically recorded on discs and cylinders and played on period machines circa 1895-1925.” Hear just about every accent and plenty of ancient sounding audio from sketches to acoustic era music.

Thomas Edison’s Attic

Page + Podcast
“The audio curator at Edison National Historic Site rummages through the archives of the legendary Edison Laboratory of West Orange, New Jersey. Tune in for Edison cylinder and disc record rarities, many not heard since “the old man” himself stashed them away, featuring: Tin Pan Alley pop songs, ragtime, vaudeville comedy sketches, flapper dance bands, old-time country tunes, historic classical music, laboratory experiments and other artifacts – all dating from 1888 through 1929.” Good old songs in the public domain [they should be].

Muriel’s Treasure with Irwin

Page + Podcast
“An hour of vintage calypso, soca, mento, pan, and related Caribbean genres – and NO reggae (or Belafonte). Sexy and saucy, ribald and raunchy recordings from the 1920s to the 1980s, and occasionally later.” Island sounds that might make you want to take a vacation or find romance.

Warning: expect long page load time for the next pages… If you don’t know, WFMU is also home to weird things via Beware of the Blog, also hosting Round 2 of 365 Days Project of daily mp3s of uncommercial music, and random oft-amusing video clips.