When I used to maintain a large MP3 collection my absolute favorite tool to organize and “tag” the MP3s with artist, album and title information was Magnus Brading’s MP3/Tag Studio. Thde reason this worked so well for me is because as I ripped CDs I would put the music into folders by album and artist using track number and title for the filename. MP3/Tag Studio allowed me to capture all of that information from the path and put it into the tags. But some time ago I switched from MP3s to the lossless FLAC format. FLAC also allows tagging but tools are fewer and far between. Luckily I’ve discovered an open source tagging tool that looks like it will fit the bill. EasyTAG appears to have many of the same features as MP3/Tag Studio but works with many types of files including MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack which is a great advantage in my implementation. It’s also a cross platform application available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows which is useful for those of us who regularly work with several different OSs.
Monthly Archives: June 2007
A better antivirus/anti-malware?
Even when I’m generally satisfied with software I’m using I like to keep an eye out for other, potentially better, solutions. In this case I have great hopes that eEye Digital Security has produced a better antivirus/anti-spyware/anti-malware solution than what has been available in the past. From Norton to McAfee to TrendMicro and others the traditional antivirus vendors seem to suck up more and more computing resources even when most of the security threats are coming from spyware, rootkits and other areas for which little or no protection is provided. Luckily, if you’re a home user the new kid on the block, eEye, has come out with a product called Blink which purports to be a security center for your PC which works and uses considerably fewer resources than the other options. If the hype is real this could easily become my solution of choice. Thanks to the current free 1-year subscription promotion I’ve installed it on a few computers and will be watching to see how it performs. It sounds like an interesting product and has some powerful features so I have high hopes.
Network Settings Profiles
When you’re regularly moving from one network to another it’s often useful to be able to store a profile of network settings which can quickly be recalled to set things such as a static IP address, etc. Many newer laptops include software to do just this but for those doing it with desktops or who have replaced the OS on the laptop it’s useful to know third party utilities exist which can accomplish the same thing.
Two free utilities are Network Switcher and SwitchNetConfig some of the low cost/shareware ones are SwitchPro, NetSetMan, Mobile Net Switch and NetSwitcher though many others exist as well. If you know of others, especially a free or open source solution I would encourage you to leave a comment and let others know about its existence.
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