Having recently gathered more than 100GB of music from all of my computers into a single drive, I’m faced with the cleaning of more than five thousand songs with generic filenames such as “Track1.mp3” and some even left untagged which is even worse. The process of singlehandedly looking up and tagging can take months.

Just so you know how it goes:

1. Look up album on Amazon or do a web search.

2. Find an exact match for my copy of the song.

3. Copy/write song info into ID3 tag, including album art.

One song might take two to three minutes, indie tracks might take longer.. that’s time I just don’t have!

A quick search gave me TidySongs……. simply… one of the most useful software I’ve ever ran into. Through your iTunes playlist, TidySongs looks up each song on Amazon’s music database and suggests details, furthermore, providing a “confidence” level of how close it matches your song against the recommendation.

Add album art – for example you might have a library that doesn’t need polishing but lacks album art, you can opt to do just that without modification of any other details.

Find duplicates – similar to iTune’s Show Duplicates feature but does more as it highlights the songs by appending “DUPLICATE” to the song name or you can set it to automatically remove the song from the iTunes playlist and move the file to the Desktop or a folder of your choice.

Fix your songs – crème de la crème; TidySongs goes through your whole playlist and sorts each song by comparing its existing tag to the Amazon database then recommending additional/changing details.

You might have misspelled songs or artists, missing details such as album name, genre or even track number, TidySongs fills that up!

Organize genres – I have VERY ODD genres in iTunes…. including “Mexico”, “Animal” and my favorite… “Evil”. This lets me rename “Evil” to “Goth”, “Death Metal”, any other existing genre or to a new name.

You have to love how powerful this little app is as it lets you specify which song details can be altered by Fix your songs. Also, the option to undo fixed songs is extremely handy because……

YES, AUTOMATIC! It can sort your music AUTOMATICALLY! If you’re having doubts about the quality of tagging (which it has as well, considering one’s music album can potentially contain eccentric songs)…….

TA-DA! A confidence level ranging from 50-95%. The confidence level is determined by how close a song’s details is against the online databases’. Usually a song which has a title and artist name exactly like the one in the database will have a confidence level of above 90%, so personally I always set it to 95% when auto-fixing so it never confuses songs.

(YES I HAVE THE THEME SONG TO POKEMON)

Personally, the only thing I didn’t like about TidySongs is its use of the Adobe Air runtime environment, understandable as it allows TidySongs to run on Windows and OS X… but from experience (TweetDeck uses over 150MB of RAM!), its such a memory hog. This is a minor annoyance to be honest, nothing that outshines the convenience for using it.

TidySongs makes use of Amazon’s music database, so as the database expands, so does TidySongs’ support of songs. Quality of details is of course, depending on whether the guy that was responsible for that entry had too much or too little time. Currently at 4M, it should cater to most if not all mainstream artists. Not bad, not bad at all!

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND TIDYSONGS, WHETHER YOU’RE A MUSIC LOVER OF 100 SONGS TO 100,000! Get it now, try it on 100 songs! www.tidysongs.com

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

It was a great trip.

How can I begin to tell you the awesome? Food was heart stopping, beautiful women and sights to see. It felt like a ‘provincey’ version of Manila while keeping the things you get from a big city: business, convenience and leisure. Cebu was clean and orderly, I only expect the best from a renowned name in tourism.

I especially loved the convenience of pulling over a taxi, quoting a driver –“there are more taxis than passengers”, this essentially means not only is it easy to get a cab at any hour, they don’t even require you to pay extra or haggle for fixed priced rides.

Had the lost in translation situations where other would usually come up to me and just flood me with Cebuano (their local dialect) which gave me the benefit of the doubt that they were reassuring me of my near fit figure as the only good reply I had was a shrugged nod. Of course.. there’s always people who would offer concubines having noticed my Japanese blood. Mabuhay!

I had friends guess where this photo was taken after each one got a quick glimpse. Not surprisingly, they all said Greenbelt. You would be fooled too if you saw it for yourself –the Terraces at Ayala Center Cebu. It’s gorgeous to see and hang out at night where bars stay up ‘til late.

One of the few places we got to visit on a very tight schedule for anything other than work was Sto. Nino Church while is conveniently just beside Magellan’s Cross.

I may have pissed off a group of people when I forgot to disable the flash from my camera and ….fired a very mean beam inside the hall where the actual Sto. Nino was. To make things worse there was this sign conveniently placed outside:

Yeah I got an instant +1 to the many things I need forgiveness for.

For lunch we dined at the Tinderbox, which I found to be your run-of-the-mill semi-classy restaurant from the outside as I walked in. I was wrong, upon seating I got around and noticed a house made entirely out of what seems to be……. graham biscuits! After much sniffing curiosity got the best of me and while no one was looking I had executed a quick lick.. yes they’re real graham cookies! It would be shallow to judge the overall quality and status of an establishment entirely on the material they picked to make their Christmas festive decoration, but that’s the kind of guy I am and I say graham is a classy choice.

Oh yes, the food was great too.

Pictures to follow; above the Tinderbox restaurant is the coveted Z-Bar by Kenneth Cobonpue, a popular name in interior design. We arrived in the late afternoon and it doesn’t open until 6PM but a friendly staff showed us around. I wasn’t able to take pictures as my camera is highly unreliable without proper lighting therefore let me just recommend this blog post: http://experiencedelux.blogspot.com/2009/05/kenneth-cobonpues-z-bar-cebu.html

The next stop was the Taoist temple in Beverly Hills where this panorama was taken. We were greeted by a hard ass guard who “timed” our stay at thirty minutes and warned us to be extra quiet. It seemed as if he knew I was trouble! He stayed at the entrance where we didn’t expect him to come look for us once we got in but not long he got around and sent us on our way out.

Cebu was just the trip I needed, wait…. that’s bullshit travel talk. Cebu was fucking awesome!