Category: Software

A Forester’s Tale

You had wanted to be a forester for a long time. On childhood walks in the forest with your parents, the stacked piles of cut logs fascinated you: clearly the result of human skill, but somehow also still a part of the forest. Each log different. Each pile unique.

As an adult you found work and, each morning, you headed out into the wide, enveloping forest with your axe. Years passed, and you cultivated your skills as a forester.

Then they came to you and told you that the world had changed, and that you had to use a chainsaw. They said that chainsaws were the future. So you learned to wield one: the difference between cutting and chopping; how to hold your body; necessary maintenance; the angle and stroke of the file to sharpen the chain. Years passed. The labour, like the forest, seemed endless, and you continued to develop your skills.

Then they came to you again and told you that the world had changed, and that you had to sit in a room in a building in an office park in the city and supervise a fleet of robotic tree-harvesting agents. The machines never stopped, they said, and were better at chopping-down trees than people were, and more productive. They said that this was the future.

So you learned how to use the remote controls, the telepresence headset, and the communication systems. Each day you devised a harvesting plan for your team if agents, even though the machines were almost completely autonomous. And the air in that room was grey and stale.

And that was when you realised that, for you, it was never about chopping down trees, or the height of the log-pile. It was always about being in the forest.

An MP3 Metadata Minimiser

Herewith another small software tool that I built because I needed it, and because I couldn’t find anything that already addressed that need.

ID3Minimiser minimises and simplifies the ID3 metadata found in MP3 audio files. This is the information that describes attributes like the album name, track name, genre, track number, etc. Point ID3Minimiser at directories containing MP3 files and it will re-write the metadata to make it simpler. The use-case is older, non-software media players that don’t understand proper audio tagging practices.

My need for this was because my car, a Ford Fiesta, is equipped with a somewhat idiosyncratic navigation and media system called SYNC. And while SYNC is happy to play audio files on a USB flash drive that’s plugged into the car, it often doesn’t really understand what it is doing. Modern versions of SYNC might do better, but the v1.x system that my car has is still living 2018. Sometimes it might play the tracks in the right order, and sometimes it might not. Multiple genres confuse it, as do multiple artists. Give it files that define a disc number and total discs (the TPOS tag) and it will happily play track 1 from each disc in turn (often in some almost-random order), then all the track 2s, then all the track 3s, etc. Not what I want.

ID3Minimiser fixes this by batch-editing a copyof your audio files: collapsing the track ordering to use only the normal track numbering tag (TRCK), removing multiple genres, artists, etc., and renaming files so that that their sort-order corresponds to the intended track order. It also removes some unnecessary tags. It does what I need, and not a whole lot more.

Not many people will need this. Most people just stream music on their phone, or some other more capable device. But if, like me, you need it, then the repo and initial release are here.