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How To: MusicMagicMixer

Another duplicate mp3 finder is MusicMagicMixer. I liked this one for speed and simple UI. On launching the application you will be provided with a dialog to select the media you like to scan. After selecting the directory containing the media it will start scanning the files. And once that is done the application will start processing the files to create audio fingerprints immediately. The good thing is that the processing is very fast. In about 20 minutes it was able to finish processing all of the 578 files. However the bad news is that it is not as good as DuMP3 when finding duplicates. It found none from the 578 files. So you either have a fast but not accurate software or accurate but slow software. The choice is yours :). But for me I still like the MusicMagicMixer. It did find duplicates in the previous run which I deleted and so now it is showing empty duplicates. And then  DuMP3 could find a few more. I don't know if there is a better software that will

How To: DuMP3

After searching for some mp3 duplicate finders for Linux I finally found two good applications. One of them is DuMP3. In this blog post I will walk through the steps showing screenshots and measuring the performance. Upon launching the application you will see the following window on your screen. A very simple and clean interface. On the left side you will have to select the files that you want to compare and add them into the right pane. In my case all my collection is in one place which I added as shown below Once you press the "Next" button the software will scan all the media in the directories that you selected in your right pane and it will make a list of file extensions that are contained in the directories. These will be shown in the following screen where you can select the file formats that you want to compare. Seems like the software can find duplicates of images as well. That is neat! Anyway I just want audio de-duplication so I selected mp3, ogg an

Are there some good duplicate mp3 finders?

I have a very large music collection. Some of them are duplicates and remixes. I wanted to clean up my collection of duplicates. Being a Linux user and also cheap I wanted to search for a free software for Linux that would scan through my collection and identify duplicates. Only after searching the net for such a software did I find out how difficult it is to get something like that for Linux. A lot of the software is not free, but more importantly they are not available for Linux. I finally found a few that were either written in java or python and so are platform independent in a way. Of those I found only two applications worthwhile and easy to use (has an easy to understand GUI interface). One of them is called DuMP3 and another is called MusicMagicMixer, both of which are written in java or have parts of java code. I am intentionally not providing links to these applications because they will become broken links pretty quickly. You can do a search for them on your favorite searc

Boxee box?

How about that? Just as I was looking for some HTPCs there are more and more options available. The Boxee box looks very nice and very different from any HTPC cases I have seen so far. More details over at http://www.boxee.tv/box . I wonder why Boxee went with d-link. What ever the reasons it does sport RF remote control, S/PDIF, RCA audio outputs, HDMI, SD, USB, WiFi, and Ethernet. All this fits into a really small package. Just look at the size along side of a coke can. It will be interesting to see how thing will go with Boxee. Hulu created so many problems to Boxee and it jumped over all the hoops. It is time for some payback. The interface also looks neat. The Boxee media center is a fork of xbmc so we know it is powerful, well done and will play a lot of media formats. Waiting for its release...

ION platform with PCI slot

As explained in my previous blog , I needed an ION platform with a PCI slot. The slot will hold my already existing TV tuner card. I searched for a nvidia ION motherboard with a PCI slot. I could only find one in newegg . At $160 it is pretty cheap too! Now I need a case to enclose it. I found this case . It is not the best, but will do for now. The reason for going with this case is because I wanted it to be compact and at the same time should be able to house 2 3.5" hard drives and a 5.25" blu-ray drive. The case is small at 11.80" x 8.70" x 5.1". The cost of this case is $40. Next up, I need a couple of memory sticks. I am not planning to remove the memory sticks from my desktop PC and put them here because I want to sell the old desktop in a proper working condition. It will have everything except for the TV tuner card. I think 1 GB should be sufficient for the small HTPC especially since it will run linux. A quick search produced results with 1 GB memo

nVidia ION for HTPC

This is an exciting time for buying HTPC devices. They come in really small sizes, they are efficient and yet can playback 1080p video and boot in under 30 seconds. The most exciting hardware (for me anyway) is the ION platform from nVidia. These are tiny motherboard and CPU combos that do wonders considering their size and power usage. I had my eye on this one for a while now. It looks great and for once I can put my HTPC in front of everyone in the living room. But there are a couple of reasons I keep reconsidering. First the bare bones HTPC has a small 2.5" 320 GB hard drive. Well I guess that is what gives it the small size. And the second reason is that it does not have a PCI slot. The tv tuner card I have sits in a PCI slot. Of course I can buy the latest and greatest USB tv tuner card, but I have my reasons to not to. I have painstakingly configured my PCI tv tuner card in Gentoo (my favorite OS). When I brought the tuner card the drivers were still buggy and you had to

My HTPC

I have my eye on a new HTPC, but what does my current one look like? Here it is. The desktop PC that acts as my apache, mysql, samba, vnc, nx, xbmc and mythtv servers. In addition it is a media player. I have to hide it behind my TV because it looks so big and ugly. But it serves me well. Even while running 24/7 for the past two and a half years, I never had a single problem. It has 2 fans, one to cool the processor and one at the back to blow the air out of the case. The fan at the back sometimes would not run after a restart and I have to kick start it by spinning the fan with my hand and it will continue to run. For this reason and also to keep the PC much cooler I have left one side of the desktop open. This is how my media center running xbmc looks like from the front. And here is the vnc viewer connected to my HTPC showing off mythtv tv guide. You can see the gkrellm running on the left side showing all the vital stats like cpu, gpu, hard drive temperature, memory,

The new HTPCs are so tempting

It has been a while since I blogged here. Got very busy. But I am hoping to restart. We will see how it goes. Today's topic is HTPC. There are some really wonderful HTPCs coming out these days. I wish I could buy all of them :). I have an old HTPC now. You can barely call it a HTPC. It is simply a desktop that I filled up with a lot of hard disks. It has an AM2 motherboard capable of 6 channel surround sound with AMD X2 3600+ processor and nvidia 9800 GT GPU. The GPU is way too powerful than required for a HTPC I know, but it was also my gaming machine for a while. Crammed into all the spaces are 4 hard disks with 250 GB each. I also have a kworld pci ATSC/QAM tuner for all my digital tv recording needs. It was so much fun when I built it more than a couple of years ago. For the software I used freevo as my media center software. It would record shows too. So I did not need anything else. It was very configurable and everything is in python and most importantly it can playback

Google Chromium (the open source chrome browser) on Gentoo!

Chromium is not yet complete no matter what I say here. Please do not post bugs or assume this is the final version of chromium. It still lacks a lot of features. My intension here is to only show you how you can get started on building chrome in Gentoo. Google chromium project has come a long way. I have been building chromium once in a while but it was not stable and was slow until recently. But now I am using it as my primary browser (well there are some exceptions as I will explain later)! It is better than my firefox experience (at least in linux). To get started head over to this link . First you will need to have all the prerequisites . In ubuntu it is pretty easy. On gentoo we need the gentoo package equivalents of all the prerequisites. Here is the list of things I mapped from ubuntu packages to Gentoo. * Python >= 2.4 ---> python * Perl >= 5.x --> perl * gcc/g++ >= 4.2 --> gcc * g++-multilib >=4.2 --> ? * bison >= 2.3 --

Installing Boxee on Gentoo: my experience

You have probably heard of Boxee and Gentoo (come on). I wanted to give Boxee a try, because of all the movies and tv shows that I can watch for free. I have already switched from Freevo to xbmc (which is a story in itself) as my primary media center. Since boxee is a fork of xbmc I thought I might give it a try. Why not? Because xbmc was so easy to compile and install. I did not have any problem compiling the latest code from subversion. I registered and downloaded the latest code from Boxee's website. There is no link to svn and so I downloaded version 0.9.11.5591. The compile was pretty simple 1. Untar the downloaded file 2. autoconf 3. ./configure 4. make -j3 However the compile was not successful. The first problem I ran into was this compile error: XAPP_MC.cpp:12:20: error: bxcurl.h: No such file or directory To solve it, I googled around and found the solution in the boxee forums. I had to make minor modifications to the following Makefiles xbmc/Makefile SRCS += BoxeeAuthen