How to sync Google Music genres with iTunes genres
“Why does Google Music show the wrong genres (compared to my iTunes genres?)”
This past weekend I went a little crazy trying to synchronize my iTunes library with the (otherwise totally awesome) Google Music service. As someone who had spent many hours carefully organizing the genres for my iTunes library, I was depressed to see all sorts of wrong and weird genres overriding my own metadata when viewing my library from within Google Music. After a great deal of digging and testing I figured out that the problem has to do with how iTunes encodes (or doesn’t encode) MP3 tags for standard/default genres like ‘Rock’ or ‘Folk’.
Here’s how to make your Google Music track genres match what you’ve set in iTunes:
1. Delete your entire Google Music library
This may be a painful step if you’ve already spent several days uploading your 100 GB iTunes music collection to the cloud, but it’s a necessary step since (at present time) Google Music will not check iTunes for any metadata changes after a MP3 file has been initially uploaded.
2. Re-tag your iTunes library with ‘custom’ genres
To make sure that Google Music accurately reflects the genres you’ve set in iTunes, you can’t use any of the standard/default iTunes genres. These are the autocomplete genres that come pre-installed with iTunes: Alternative, Blues/R&B, Books & Spoken, Children’s Music, Classical, Country, Dance, Easy Listening, Electronic, Folk, Hip Hop/Rap, Holiday, House, Industrial, Jazz, New Age, Pop, Religious, Rock, Soundtrack, Techno, Trance, Unclassifiable, World. Don’t use them.
Reassigning 1000′s of track genres isn’t as painful as it might seem. Just:
- Use View->Column Browser->Genres to select all the tracks belonging to a disallowed genre, e.g. ‘Classical’
- Select ‘Get Info’ from under the ‘File’ menu
- Type in a new genre you’ve made up yourself, e.g. ‘Classical-Modern’
My own methodology included making sure that all of my new genres included hypens, for example ‘Pop-Vintage’ and ‘Classical-Vocal’. Since none of the iTunes default genres have hypens, I knew I was done re-tagging my music when 100% of genres in the iTunes column browser were hyphenated.
3. Re-upload your iTunes library to Google Music
To make sure you do a clean upload, you might want to clear out the Google Music Manager application preferences and cache. I’m not sure how you do this on Windows, but on a Mac you:
- Quit the Music Manager (click on the headphones icon in the Mac OS toolbar)
- Delete [home]/Library/Preferences/com.google.musicmanager.plist
- Delete [home]/Library/Appplication Support/Google/MusicManager
- Re-launch Music Manager from your Applications folder
With a little luck and these instructions, you should be able to coerce Google Music into reflecting your iTunes genre assignments.
Keep an online diary & send emails to your future self
After more than 5 years of planning and full year of on-and-off programming, I’m pleased to announce the public beta launch of My Future Self at http://MyFutureSelf.com:
“My Future Self is a new way to keep an private journal online. It will encourage you to write about your life and the stories from your past. If you have kids, it’s a way to start keeping a journal for them – for when they grow up and wonder what was going on during their early years.
My Future Self is not a website. It is a private journal you will keep via email, sometimes responding to questions about your life, sometimes by sending an email just because you feel like writing down what happened to you today.
The only time you’ll return to this website will be to explore what you’ve written. When you do come back, what makes My Future Self special is that your stories will automatically be organized into timelines, places, dates, and relationships so that you can better visualize and understand the story of your life.”
MyFutureSelf.com
How to change the width of an automatic WordPress embed
One of the superb things about WordPress is that it will automatically convert YouTube URLs into embeds (as well as URLs pointing to Vimeo, Flickr, Hulu etc.)
For example, the video you see embedded on this post was supplied from within the WordPress post editor like this:
How to set the size of automatic embeds for your entire WordPress site:
Login as the WordPress admin and go to Settings: Media. There you’ll see boxes for setting your maximum embed height and width. This will change the width of your embeds throughout your whole site. It’s retroactive so if you change theses settings, they’ll impact embeds even on posts and pages you authored before making the update.
Login as admin, look for Settings: Media
How to change the size for an individual embed:
If you need to make an embed bigger or smaller for a particular page or post, you can override the global media settings by adding a little code to your post, like this:
[embed width="390" height="300"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ[/embed]
Feedback for NPR’s Android App
Here’s some feedback for the open source development team that’s updating NPR’s somewhat buggy but hugely valuable Android application:
Please make it easier to listen to NPR programs with this app.
I’m sure there are users of this App who like to fiddle around with the program streams and create their own custom playlists, but the premise I’m working on is that the majority of people who use the NPR Android App use it for a simple purpose: to listen to a show. NPR is radio, and the great thing about radio is that you can listen to it while working, walking, running, or driving.
Consequently, every time I use this app I’m frustrated because it takes me about 70 seconds of pointing, dragging, and button clicking (14 steps in all) to listen to a show. Don’t believe me? Watch this video, which also includes a recommendation for improvement:
Have you figured out a way to bypass any of these 14 steps? Let me know in the comments.
Breathe Free Tibet
Every year, I agree to build one or two non-profit websites at a discounted rate. This year, I was especially honored to be given the opportunity to design and launch BreatheFreeTibet.org. The purpose of this organization is to “save an ancient culture from extinction” by improving health care available to Tibetans in exile. This population suffers from one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world.
Please consider making a donation to this organization, whose fundraising is conducted by The Tibet Fund (a four star charity as rated by Charity Navigator) and whose mission is personally endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet.
www.breathefreetibet.org
Website Redesign for Unity Woods Yoga
Unity Woods Yoga hired me to design and build a modern website for their four yoga studio locations in the Washington DC area. The client is able to edit 100% of the pages on the website using WordPress, including all homepage content, instructor bios and the blog. Additionally, class schedules are automatically synchronized to a 3rd party yoga class registration web service via XML and attractively rendered using AJAX for super-speedy navigation.
www.unitywoods.com
“I engaged Canton for a complete redesign of the website for Unity Woods Yoga. It’s hard to know what to praise first. His expert technical knowledge of WordPress and his creative design advice made the site far more attractive and user-friendly than before. His skill in automating a connection to the studio’s online registration system will save the staff many hours of work each month. I especially appreciate the value he consistently added above and beyond my expectations with extra tweaks and improvements that I didn’t even know to ask for.”
– Sue Lyn Schramm
Marketing / Outreach for Unity Woods
Website & blog redesign for Round Mountain
Round Mountain is a “Two man singing folk orchestra” based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When musicians Char and Robby Rothschild received a last-minute invitation to play at the Folk Alliance conference in Memphis, they asked me for an emergency meeting to see if it would be possible to build them a brand new website in short order. The website you see below was designed and built in 10 hours using “The Station” WordPress theme as a starting point.
Highlights from this marathon design session included:
- Creating the two minute promotional video featured on the home page
Because a good video is essential for promoting a band - Automatically importing over six years of blog posts from blogger.com
Because splitting your content across 2 sites hurts your Google ranking - Promoting Facebook and newsletter signups (via iContact)
Because having a website is not enough: you need to ‘push’ your news to your audience because they may not return to your website on their own
www.RoundMountainMusic.com
Eclectic Mix of “Some Guys”
A departure from my usual dance/electronica mixes. This one includes everything from Appalachian blues to electronic/glitch to hip hop to pirate ballads to chants. I put this together when a group of my Guy Friends got together to share stories and music. The only theme to this mix that the songs are all recorded by … guys.
Click to zoom track listing
The Asia Foundation wins Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award
Our work helped The Asia Foundation earn a prestigious Non-Profit Standard of Excellence Award in the 2010 Web Marketing Association WebAwards. Congratulations to the asiafoundation.org web team including David Hirschi, Donovan Watts, and Keith Mitchell. It’s notable that most of this award-winning design work was completed almost three years ago, proving that our work remains relevant and fresh long after launch-date.
This website is powered by our custom CMS which allows Asia Foundation staff to edit virtually every page of the website without any special tools. Certain areas of the website are seamlessly integrated with WordPress, YouTube, and SlideShowPro to take advantage of these industry-leading tools for news, video, and photo publishing.
Floodwaters (lush techno)
My first original techno track in a long, long while. Lush, layered, moody, epic. Composed in daily 20 or 30 minute stolen workday moments over the course of several weeks.
Finished this during a moment in history when 2,000 Pakistanis have died and 20 million are injured or homeless as a result of massive flooding which in many ways is eclipsing the last three major natural disasters combined.
If this creative-commons released free tune gets your head bobbing and heart throbbing, I gently ask that you consider making a donation to one of these many four-star charities providing relief to those displaced by the waters.
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