Monday, August 06, 2007

....And I thought mp3 was a simple music format

I was of course wrong, it was a relatively simple format when all you had was fixed bitrates and a simple 128 byte v1 tag that was always at the end of the file, then came Variable bitrate formats and version 2 tags with expand on the version 1 tags and then more so, even that's had revisions ever wondered how when you tune into an internet radio station and it will sometimes show you how much of the song / show has been done well that's V2 tags at work right there. I'm saying all this because finally I've just about cracked a fully working ID3 Version 1 / Version 2 tag reader and also a mpeg frame decoder, a bit like animation frames but with audio, that works with a few common mp3 encoders and detects and works out the correct length of time for the audio without having to analyse all of the mp3 file like I thought I was going to have to :-S takes less time. Im going to see if once I've got it all completed I can't do a slight tweak to it and have it as a stand-alone mp3 database tool, it currently needs a webserver to run off as it's written in PHP using a MySQL Database all run on an Apache Webserver although it's possible to download all these and play around and get them working I prefer not to so I found the following solution Xampp it works, great for it you wanna dabble a little, wanna try a templete out on your wordpress but don't want to throw it up online - test it offline, you can pretty much run wordpress straight away although Moveable Type requires the addition of perl (just grab the install from the xampp page and your done). It's how I was able to play around so much with my templete when I was playing around and test it as much as possible but sometimes you just need to throw it online and see.
Oh and on a side note, I didn't get drunk on Saturday night even although I did plan on it, I got "merry" enough to have little voice on sunday due to the amount of singing I did, it was a good band they had doing a medley of current hits with a few from ages past..

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