Posts Tagged ‘software’

Essential Software // Dirpy

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

One thing I hate is when full versions of songs (live or studio) are posted via youtube. Other than the poor audio quality of the “videos”, my biggest gripe is that if you discover a song that you do like, you can never have a tangible copy which you can store into your media player’s library. Apparently this has not only irked just me as I found a site online that provides a solution to this problem: Dirpy.

After first entering the hyperlink of the youtube video you want to rip the audio from, Dirpy redirects you to a panel where you can tweak a handful of options.

I especially like the ability to choose when to start/stop the audio rip, as many youtube versions of live performances begin with crowd noise or band banter which I prefer not to listen to repeatedly. In addition, the user has the ability to edit ID3 tag data so that you can properly catalog a song, making the transition from web to media player much more seamless. Obviously the only downside is the 128 kbps maximum audio quality, but that is the most you would expect from a youtube video, so it isn’t their fault.

Here’s a Four Tet remix mp3 ripped using Dirpy to give you an idea of finished product:

Four Tet // Love Cry (Joy Orbison Remix)

Essential Software // Tune-Up

Sunday, February 8th, 2009


If you are an avid iTunes user like me, one of the most aggravating problems you have to deal with is the problems mislabeled iD3 tags have on album artwork. Some might think this isn’t too big of issue, but with the popularity of Cover Flow® on new Apple Products (I’m looking at you iPhone and iPod Touch), any sort of kinks with album artwork, no matter how minor there are, snowballs into a major sorting issue. The two most common problems I have are unrecognized album artwork or, for some reason or another, tracks from the same album associated with different album art.

Enter Tune-Up: a program which correctly relabels your iD3 tags and, as a result, selects correct album artwork for every album it finds in its searchable directory. Always linked whenever you open iTunes, Tune-Up has a nice interface where you can drag and drop problematic CDs and it will automatically find and fix the problems. I’ve been using Tune-Up for about a year now and I’ve only had a handful of disks which it couldn’t find (mostly hip-hop mixtapes) – it’s THAT good.
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