Tag Archives: geek porn

My 2021 in music scrobbles

Posted on Saturday, 12. March 2022 by hmvh

While we’re on a roll with music and metadata, let’s throw coronavirus and statistics into the mix. What I did do was scrobble the metadata embedded within a stash of local MP3 files — usually playing “100 random songs” as background music while going on with my salaried work or other activities. Last.fm has a personal profile on me. This post is about distorted data and false analyses. Continue reading →

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The ISRC conundrum

Posted on Saturday, 12. February 2022 by hmvh

Furthering the previous article on music metadata, today I’d like to describe my recent observations about ISRCs. It’s a 12-character, alphanumeric code that aims to uniquely identify a sound recording — irrespective whether it’s a song, spoken word, or a music video. According to the official handbook, a song’s album version will have a different ISRC to, for instance, a radio edit or a dance remix. Knowing the ISRC and understanding its implementation can be useful in identifying and differentiating between versions of a song recording. This was important to me last year when I set out to “archive” a batch of CDs (mostly singles and promos). Continue reading →

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Music. Meta. Madness.

Posted on Saturday, 1. January 2022 by hmvh

In December I had to give a presentation on a topic of my choice. Predictably, the topic I picked involved Discogs. At first I considered simply showcasing some Venn diagrams or random insights and fun facts gleaned from its raw data but, alas, it turns out that data is only interesting if it has more than one dimension. Prose is not data. Discogs isn’t exactly “Big Data” either. Privacy was another aspect worth diving into. But at the very heart of this contentious data there was a message I could easily convey: Where does it come from, and why is much of it garbage? Continue reading →

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Hard drives and sponges

Posted on Tuesday, 17. March 2015 by hmvh

Hard drives are the under-appreciated workhorses of a standard PC configuration. The other day I discovered some old documents and specifications about hard drives as well as a bunch of real hard drives in the basement. Here’s a page of tales and photos about seven workhorses getting slaughtered. Continue reading →

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Cassette Project #1: A Reprise

Posted on Saturday, 29. October 2011 by hmvh

Two years ago I wrote about how my tape collection had, as part of the process of elimination and digitization, actually ballooned to more than tenfold its original size. Wheat and bran had been separated from the chaff — although no negligible amount of the former has been dropped off on my desk since then. I’ve begun entering that serendipitous stockpile of cassettes into the database. Continue reading →

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