I'm going on vacation (OBX!) in a week, and figured I should probably update my music player (a Sansa Fuze) for the 12-hour ride there. I've had most of it sync'd for a while, but then I noticed that a few songs were missing ReplayGain tags. Oh no! (ReplayGain ensures everything plays at the same volume so your ears don't bleed when switching songs.)

So, there were a few options:

1. Erase the player and re-sync 3.5 GB of songs.
2. rsync the changed songs after adding ReplayGain tags
3. Find which songs on the player were missing ReplayGain tags

The first option isn't very nice on the flash memory, and I figured there was a smarter way to go about things.

The second would have been viable if Banshee hadn't been updating playcount tags in the files, so almost everything had changed anyway.

So I dove into the third. Installed tagtool and started dumping some files. Those with ReplayGain had "REPLAYGAIN" in the output. Easy enough. It took some time, but I came up with the following command:

find . -name "*.ogg" -print -exec sh -c "tagtool --dump \"{}\" | grep -L REPLAYGAIN" \;

It looks through all ogg files (might work for MP3 too), sends them to tagtool, and then checks the output for a lack of "REPLAYGAIN" in which case it prints "(standard input)" after the filename.

So I ran this, sent it to a file, and scanned it for "standard input." Found about 20 songs. Deleted them off of the player, had Banshee re-sync, and things were back to being awesome.

Now I know what you're saying: "Why not just use Banshee's search bar?" Yes, Banshee's search is quite powerful, but unfortunately you cannot yet search by raw tag or replaygain.

/me scurries off to bugzilla

Edit: Bug 624000. Nice number!

Back from vacation. Went on a last-minute trip to Cedar Point on the way back (third time this year).

Actually bought one of the on-ride videos. Embedded below for your viewing pleasure; here is the YouTube link for you RSSers.

Earlier in the day accomplished the same feat on the Millennium:

Really wanted to try the chess board, but it was probably a little risky.

Also, I've moved this blog to Movable Type because I'm really tired of dealing with WordPress quirks. Please poke me if you notice any oddities.

I knew my GameCube memory card was dying, so I decided to buy a couple of cheap cards off of eBay (the official ones aren't produced anymore). The cards work fine, but there is just one problem: how can you get the data off of the dying memory card if it only wants to work half of the time?

And why are these cards so expensive? Even the generic cards go at nearly $0.50/MB, while these days you can almost get an SD card for $1/GB.