To somewhat paraphrase that Shania Twain chorus, “God, I feel like a God today.”  I’ve mentioned before that being a programmer is the best thing in the world and it’s the closest you can get to being a god.  Parents, you may think you get to play god, too, but there’s a little issue with deleting your creations when you’re done with them.  So, being a programmer is still the best.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the best things about programming is the ability to automate.  Taking what would be an insurmountable task and making it simple.  And that is what I managed to do today.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve set up a music server in the house, Plex, and in prior posts, I’ve talked about my digital music collection.  Occasionally, I mention that the metadata in the files needs improvement.  And that is also what I’ve done.

Metadata in digital files can be as extensive as you want them to be.  At a minimum, you want the artist and song title to be in there, because most players display that important identifying information.  You can go further and add the album release year and genre, so you can sort and group things that are of similar values.  You can go further still and embed artwork in the file, usually the album cover, so your music player can display that, too.  You can go even further than that and put the lyrics for the song in the metadata so some players will show you the lyrics while the song plays.  That is where I am at and it is what I have done.

There are utilities that let you edit the metadata directly, so you can create a new tag and paste in the lyrics for a song.  But, is that even fathomable to do with over 15,000 songs?  There are tools that will let you look up the lyrics to a song and create the tag automatically, but still, song by song.  I never got to the point of finding utilities that would process a whole album at one time, because I realized I could do it better.  I could do it exactly as I needed it to be done.

With Plex, there is no support for embedded lyrics in the metadata.  Instead, they use what’s called a “side-car” file, which is the same file name, but different extension.  So you have your .flac file and a duplicate .txt file with the lyrics.  Ok, that’s pretty crappy, but I can do it.  But, if I’m going to go through the trouble of getting all these lyric files, why not embed them at the same time?

So I did a quick search online and found a code library that would read and write FLAC metadata.  That’s the only thing I couldn’t do on my own, so I was golden now.  I learned of a website that had a simple means of downloading lyrics through their website, as long as I stripped out everything else from the webpage.  A simple RegEx statement accomplished that.  Writing to a text file, recursing through directories,  all that is simple stuff.

So, I process each artist in a batch, which enumerates all songs for all albums.  One button click to retrieve all the lyrics for all the songs, then a review of any songs that had no matches.  Correct the titles for the non-matches and get lyrics again.  Then a button to process the lyrics which both embeds the lyrics in the FLAC files and also creates a sidecar text file with the lyrics.  So, if all goes well, one double-click on the artist folder, click on Retrieve Lyrics, scroll to confirm that all lyrics came in, click Process.

So, yeah, I do have to process a little over 500 artists, but that is substantially better than thousands of albums or many thousands of songs.

While driving over the weekend, I had a humorous thought that I think I can stretch out into an extended joke.  The base premise of the joke is simple, just recaptioning an old comic strip to change the context of the comic and the dynamic between the characters.

So, to begin this, I need the original comic strips so I can deface them and make them funny in a different way.  I found the website that was hosting the comics and looked into what effort it would take to get these comics.

Here’s a small lesson in image thievery on the internet.  The most pedestrian way to get an image off the internet is to do a screen capture with something like Snipping Tool.  That route will burn you out in a matter of minutes.

The better way is to right-click the image and choose Save As.  This preserves the original image dimensions without any possible variance from lassoing.  However, web developers have gotten smarter about this technique and will do protective coding to prevent the unwanted downloading of their files.  One way to do this is to capture the mouse’s right-button click.  Other way is to overlay a transparent image over the other so when you right-click and Save As, you save the transparent image instead of the one you really want.  The most effective way is to show the image as a CSS background.  However, the truth is, if it’s in your browser, your browser requested the file and you can do it too.

To get around these tricks, you can use the developer tools built into most browsers.  They will allow you to look at the source code and find the URL of the actual image you want.  That is the path I originally took, finding the image tag, copying the URL into a new tab, then downloading/saving the image.  That lasted for about 7 images before it was too much effort.  Coders are lazy, and they write programs to do the work for them.

Looking at the URL for the image, it was a dynamic URL, not a static one.  It was similar to:

http://thewebsite.com/content.php?file=QXJlbid0IHlvdSBjbGV2ZXI/

At first, I was discouraged, because the file parameter just seemed to be a string of random characters.  There wouldn’t be any way to turn that into a reliable sequence to cycle through.  But the more I looked at the URL, the more familiar the text seemed.  I took a guess that the string was Base64-encoded, and my guess was correct.  Decoding the string resulted in another URL, although that URL was not accessible from the internet.  It was a page that “content.php” had access to, though. (Just as an aside, this programming design screams “security issues!”)

The decoded URL had a very understandable structure that would allow cycling through comics based on date.  It’s just that I would need to construct that URL, encode it in Base64, then pass the encoded URL as a parameter to the content.php address.

I fired up Visual Studio, added a datebox and a button.  I wrote 4 lines of code to construct the URL based on the date in the datebox, then download and save the image. Then I set up the button to decrement the datebox by a day and process the image.  Now, All I had to do was click a button over and over and the images would dump into a folder.  If I wanted to, I could set up a loop to cycle through images and I wouldn’t even need to click the button at all.  This was less than 15 minutes of effort.

And that is yet another example of the power that comes from being a programmer.