TuneTagger 1.0.2b2 Review

I was looking through my iTunes playlists the other day and noticed that a lot of my songs were missing information like Album, Album Year, and Album Art, so I set about looking for a solution to that. I had envisioned an app that would take each song’s Title and Artist and look on Amazon.com or something for all the information and all I would have to do it click an “Accept” button but the only things I could find were apps that found the Album Art. I knew there had to be an app out there, maybe it was just no one else had reviewed it or something, so I went to the place where I knew the new stuff showed up — VersionTracker.

The first things that popped up under the iPod/iTunes directory were of no use to me so I went through a couple of pages until an app named TuneTagger caught my eye. It claimed it could do everything I wanted and even get the songs’ lyrics. So I downloaded it and gave it a try.

First Impressions
The first thing I noticed was that the app doesn’t run like a normal app, when you install it an icon is added to the menu bar and that where all the menus are for the app, it is never the foremost app but when its panels are open they are always in the foreground above everything else. Of course, if you are planning on working on your library’s info all your attention will be on the library, right? Your attention would never on any other app that could be running and need your attention, right?

First Use
The app ran fine once I figured out how to work it, but it was a little complicated at first. Basically there are only two TuneTagger panels you need open if you are doing what I was, the review panel and the controller panel. To use the review panel you have to have a song playing for it to look for all the information and to change the songs you need to use the controller panel, this makes changing songs very quick so looking for the information is a breeze. The app doesn’t always find information for all the songs but it gets the majority so looking for the rest manually aren’t a problem.

A kink in the chain of progress
Of course, as soon as I got into a nice flow of looking for all the info and approving it then going on to the next song, I hit a snag. The app locked up and shut itself down so I restarted it and everything was going smooth again until the app locked up again. This time it wouldn’t shut down and I couldn’t access the menu icon to quit it or even Force Quit the app, it didn’t show up in the Force Quite dialog under the Apple menu and since it wasn’t ever the foremost app not even holding the shift button while in the Apple menu would show “Force Quit TuneTagger”. I had to go to the Activity Monitor and quit the application from there eventually.

Overall Impression
I wish I could say this is a wonderful beta app, I really do, but all I can say is it has really great potential. The app works… until it locks up and you have to quit it with the Application Monitor… and when it works it works well. There are a few bugs to be worked out but that is the nature of beta apps, hopefully the developer will continue to work on it and not let his vision die. Overall I wold have to give this app a 7/10, when it works it works, no doubt about that, and the only thing I could find that it lacked was a way to force quit that app when/if it locks up. I’m not really sure why developer kept it from running like an actual app with menus instead of just an icon, I like the minimalist quality but for a beta app it should have some way to force quit.

So if you are looking for an app to fill in your songs’ info and grab Album Art and Lyrics then TuneTagger is an app you should definitely check out, just beware that there will be times that you will have to quit the app with the Activity Monitor or a log-out-and-log-back-in.

TuneTagger 1.0.2b2 is Donationware — you can use it as many times as you want without paying for it and what you download is the full product, you don’t have to donate to get anything you don’t already have, except maybe a warm feeling for helping out a starving programmer

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone! I’ll be out of production for the rest of this week so don’t expect any posts until after the new year.

Tabu… Taburla… Umm.. that new MMO!

After leaving World of Warcraft (WoW) a few months ago, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go back to it and I’ve kept that promise. It’s not that I don’t like WoW — it’s a fun game — it’s just that I get bored of it so quickly, I get bored of most games very quickly. Maybe it’s ADD or maybe it’s just that I have so many other things that I need to do, but I can’t play any game too many times before I get bored of it. Usually the boredom comes after I get to a point in the game where I cannot get any further, a place where I can’t beat that boss or finish a quest or get to the next land.

Well, I told myself I wouldn’t go back to WoW but I never said anything about other MMOs, so when a friend said he was playing Tabula Rasa and he could get me a trial I jumped on it. Now, for those of you who don’t know what Tabula Rasa is, the game is a hybrid, part MMO/part FPS and it pulls it off wonderfully! If you ever played Star Wars: Galaxies (SWG) then you will remember how it was a pretty good game at first, not the best but it was good, but soon after the 3rd or 4th expansion for it SOE redid the whole game and re-released it as a left-click intensive action thing. I bring that up because Tabula Rasa takes that and makes it WORK! If you want to read some of the backstory on Tabula Rasa, you can read it here, I’m not going to go into it.

I will say that the game has held my attention, at least for the couple of hours that I played it last night. It has a “shoot-em-up” feel to it and that adds to replayability. I find myself wanting to run into random mobs on my way to a mission moreso than I did in WoW, just because it’s a shooter and not a “cast-this-spell-do-this-attack-rinse-repeat” game.

If you are interested in learning more about the game, you can check out the homepage or you can visit my buddy’s website that he is building that will soon have all of the information about Tabula Rasa you will ever need. If you play, you can find me on Pegasus, the name is Earttmahn.

Winter Snowcapades ‘07

Welcome everyone to this year’s Winter Snowcapades! This year’s contestants:

How not to get towed in snow:

And of course, my favorite:

Walmart at Midnight

The thought of a 24-hour store send tremors up a select few’s spines; the thought of a 24-hour Wal*Mart send shivers up Mrs Fireshaper’s spine. Now, I’ll agree that it is “convenient” for a store to be open at all hours of the day just in case one might have need to buy something in the early hours or if, as Mrs Fireshaper and I are wont to do, one wants to go somewhere late and nothing else is open, but sometimes it’s less convenient for the consumer than one might think.Friday night, 11:30 PM, Mrs Fireshaper and I had just gone out to eat and we still wanted to go somewhere so we ended up driving to Wal*Mart to do some late night shopping for a few things we were looking at. We have been to Wal*Mart late at night before but never around midnight and we are somewhat used to how things go late at night.

If you’ve never been to Wal*Mart that late, you would be surprised. Stock is just left on palettes in the middle of the aisles so they can put it up during the night, aisles are blocked so you can’t cross them to get to other parts of the store, and they close all of the registers at midnight. That’s right, all of the registers close at midnight so that they can reset them for the next day.

Now, I figured that at midnight they might have registers open, already reset, and ready for the people waiting in line from the closing registers but, no. We stood in line, there were about 3 people in front of us, when the associate running the register decided to reset it, of course the other register was also being reset, so we stood in line for about 15 minutes waiting for them to reset their registers. By this time the line had grown and there were 4, maybe 5, others behind us. A sales manager opened another register beside that one (after midnight) and we went over and she apologized for the wait, telling us that they had to reset the registers at midnight or everything would get messed up.

It seems that they could at least have registers ready for the swap before midnight, or right after it, to ease the amount of people who would get angry, especially at this time of year with the holidays just around the corner.

No more Whoppers!

Burger King has discontinued the Whopper sandwich … at least for a few hours in an undisclosed store. Chaos ensues and some customers share just how far they traveled to get a Whopper and some even get really mad that they couldn’t get a Whopper. All is righted in the end, though, with a special appearance by the King himself and those wronged by BK’s “joke” greet him with a smile and a hug — like a kid when she sees Santa Claus.

 What would you say if you were told they discontinued the Whopper? 

Christmas-ed out

With the changing of fall to winter come holidays and with those holidays, namely Christmas, come theatrical performances; as for Mrs Fireshaper and myself we are all performanced-out. My mother owns and operates a Christian Theatre Company and was invited to do a Christmas performance throughout the month of December at the Guido Gardens in Metter, Georgia, so we went Friday night to see the performance. It was good, it was a dinner theater, and we got a free meal out of it, along with a great show.Well yesterday afternoon we were invited by my mom and sister to go see “A Christmas Carol,” performed by our city’s local theater troupe, and we went with them today. It was good and the actor playing Scrooge was amazing! After that we went to my cousin’s Christmas play at her church. So now we are done with Christmas plays and it isn’t even close to Christmas really.Anyone else already Christmas-ed out?

Picketing

Since the WGA writers’ strike is still going on, I fear that if these writers don’t get what they want we will lose great TV! Gizmodo posted a list of television shows and how many episodes they have left and I was surprised to only see one “Reality” television show on it. This could lead to the worst thing in television history — only reality shows! I like some reality shows, especially the VH1 shows, but as a whole the genre is just getting too crowded. How many stars and semi-famous people will we end up following the daily lives of?

On a side note – I just realized that (as far as I know) the only show that has a new episode once a week, every week of the year, is wrestling. I’m not talking about the kind of wrestling in the olympics, I mean the kind you watch and don’t tell anybody you watch. They never play re-runs and they have a new episode every week. Are there any other shows/sports that also do this?