Recently, my music friend Mike Solof has been bugging me to include the full texts of my write-ups on the blog in the download zips for each album. I haven't done that until now because it's another tedious step in the process of posting these albums.
First, I'm wondering if people would find that useful or not. And second, is there anyone who has saved those texts for all or most of the albums? If so, that could save me a lot of work. Or perhaps there's someone who would volunteer to do it. That might make the difference of me including them or not.
Also, regarding the unfortunate spam that has been appearing recently with the upload.ee downloads, I'm sorry about that. It doesn't bother me, since I have an ad blocker. But I believe someone recently commented that if you use the Brave web browser, that blocks all that stuff automatically. I've been using that browser recently because YouTube recently stepped up their efforts to make everyone watch ads - and the number of ads is getting out of control. But if you watch YouTube through Brave there's no ads shown at all. So I recommend that.
If anyone has other suggestions on how to avoid the spam here, please post them so other people can find out.
I save almost all the write ups of the albums I download as pdf with a Chrome extension called "printfriendly". To me, the provide valuable information in all cases. I can send you all the ones I have or make new ones, as you like it.
ReplyDeleteWow! Awesome! That would be great if you could help. But what would be really great is if you could do them all fresh, since I've made changes over time. And also it would be better if the download links weren't included, since those change a lot and I don't want to mention dead links. Finally, if you do this, would it be possible to save the names of the files to be the same as the artist and album titles at the top of each post? Then I could easily figure out what goes where. Thanks again!
DeleteHappy to help, for sure (and give something in return to your great generosity)!! What would work best? Starting with October 2023 going backwards? What do you think? Or do you just want the ones I have?
DeleteBTW, I've noticed that by default the extension saves the pdf with the web page name, so all names are already included, like, e.g. "albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com-The Beatles - The Beatles Uncovered Volume 6 1964-2013 A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST". That is very convenient and would left us with only one work to do, that is to avoid including the links (which can of course be done).
DeleteThanks again for your offer to help. But let's wait a day or two to see if someone can figure out an automated way to do this. That might save you lots of time.
DeleteBy the way, that's great that the file names default like that. Though it would be good to cut out the unnecessary first part (albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com-).
Oh, and also if we do this, see below my comment about including the mp3 tag info. I use a program, just called "Mp3 Tag v. 3.04" - that exports the tag info into a text file. So that would be nice to include in any text file for an album. It would be nice to have the comments field and year field especially, since those often have extra info not otherwise mentioned in the song titles.
DeleteThe printfriendly chrome extension does not allow you to include neither the comments nor the mp3 tags, unfortunately...
DeleteI mostly do Copy the writeups and Paste them 'over' the brief text that is in the included textfiles. The information is crucial when it comes to sourcing the tracks, so I treat them as the 'liner notes'. It's also extremely helpful for, in your loose track collections and covers collections, you provide tracklists crediting the original artists being covered, keeping those ofr reference.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info. By the way, if you're interested in the sourcing for the tracks, are you aware of all the info I put in the mp3 tags as well? I've done that for every single album since the beginning of the blog. Perhaps if there's a text file for each album, that should be in there as well.
DeleteHere's an example of what's in the comments field for the Kirsty MacColl BBC Volume 3 album I just posted:
01 Can't Stop Killing You - See That Girl (Peter Curran Show, BBC Greater London Radio, London, Britain, 3-7-1994)
02 Soho Square - See That Girl (Peter Curran Show, BBC Greater London Radio, London, Britain, 3-7-1994)
03 MIss Otis Regrets - See That Girl (Later... with Jools Holland (BBC TV Show), London, Britain, 12-31-1994)
04 Caroline - What Do Pretty Girls Do (Kevin Greening Show, BBC, London, Britain, 2-20-1995}
05 Free World - What Do Pretty Girls Do (Kevin Greening Show, BBC, London, Britain, 2-20-1995}
06 A New England - What Do Pretty Girls Do (Kevin Greening Show, BBC, London, Britain, 2-20-1995}
07 He's on the Beach - What Do Pretty Girls Do (Kevin Greening Show, BBC, London, Britain, 2-20-1995}
08 In These Shoes - See That Girl (Later... with Jools Holland (BBC TV Show), London, Britain, 4-15-2000)
09 Nao Esperando - Unreleased, Johnnie Walker's Drive-Time Show, BBC, HMS Belfast, London, Britain, 5-29-2000
10 England 2 Colombia 0 - Unreleased, Johnnie Walker's Drive-Time Show, BBC, HMS Belfast, London, Britain, 5-29-2000
11 My Affair - Unreleased, Johnnie Walker's Drive-Time Show, BBC, HMS Belfast, London, Britain, 5-29-2000
12 Celestine - Unreleased, BBC Music Live (BBC TV Show), London, Britain, 5-20-2000
I had no idea you embedded that but am so glad you do!!
DeleteYeah, I suspect many people have no idea how to look at mp3 tags, so they don't know that info is there. Do you know how to look at those? If you do, check out the other albums I've posted. There's often interesting info there, unless all the songs on an album are from the same source.
DeleteI find the write-ups informative and interesting, and it's good to keep tabs on what might be different or unique.
ReplyDeleteQUESTION # 2 FOR YOU GUYS: I tend to make PDF's out of all of Paul's comment section. would you guys like paul to include a PDF of his comments and artwork INCLUDED WITH each download??
ReplyDeletePersonal note: I like PDF's (because to me, they are easier to read and can include his cover artwork) and Paul likes pure Text files with no cover included.
Which do you prefer???
Note that I like text files just 'cos they're easier to make and deal with than PDFs.
DeleteI usually copy & paste your texts into Word files because they're so informative and entertaining. So yeah, include them if it's not too big a pain!
ReplyDeleteI personally copy and save them, myself. I find them essential and informative.
ReplyDeleteJust an idea... wouldn't it be worth trying to download all plain HTML pages (without pictures or embedded stuff) with some kind of site downloader software, and then just extract the liner notes of each page with a script? Using regular expressions and simple scripting it should be relatively easy to do.
ReplyDeleteIf someone would know of an automated way to do this, that would be great. Does anyone?
DeleteI will have a quick look tomorrow and check if an ordinary site-downloader grabs the html pages easily. If it does, both the title of each CD and your text is wrapped in a unique html-tag, so it can be isolated. The key question will actually be, if this blog-site allows for a mass download of all pages or has any software running to block this. Because the number of pages will of course be pretty huge. I'll let you know.
DeleteThanks. And if it helps, I can make a back up file of the entire blog any time I want. I just did that yesterday. It comes out as a single .xml file. It looks like it has all the text from all the posts in it, but also lots of coding gobbledygook I don't understand. I can send you that if you give me your email address.
DeleteThe .xml file would have pros & cons... the biggest disadvantage is that it had to be split up into 1000s of separate (and correctly named) files, which is a bit of a hassle. However, I just downloaded all pages and it worked like a charm. I'm now going to separate the text and clean up all of the "gobbledygook"...
DeleteA few questions: By now, the resulting files will be organized just like your blog uploads - directories for the years, sub-directories for the months and then the files in each "month". Do you want it that way or would you prefer to get the whole lot all in one directory? Can't say yet if there will be clashes of names.
Important one: Do you want the download links in the text files, or do you want a dummy/replacement, like "(LINK)" or "(for the download please visit albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com)"?
And finally - the text files should/will be UTF-8, because some contain all sorts of foreign characters and none of the classic ASCII/8-Bit encodings would serve all of them. Is that OK for you?
Wow, thanks! If you can do all that, that would be great. And you could save Nico from having to do a bunch of work. In terms of organization, what would be really great is if you could organize it by artist name. Then by the year of the album, preferrably. Because I'm going to have to take all of these little files and drop them into my music collection, and that's how I organize things.
DeleteAlso, if you're so tech savvy, it would be amazing if, while you're at it, you could extract the mp3 tags from the mp3s and include all the info from that in each album's text file.
Re: this:
DeleteImportant one: Do you want the download links in the text files, or do you want a dummy/replacement, like "(LINK)" or "(for the download please visit albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com)"?
I don't really know what you mean. Maybe it would be easier if you email me? My email address is: thompson22 @ runbox.com. (Remove the spaces)
>And finally - the text files should/will be UTF-8, because some contain all sorts of foreign characters and none of the classic ASCII/8-Bit encodings would serve all of them. Is that OK for you?
That's all Greek to me, so whatever you think is best. Although I should note that I've systematically avoided using accent marks because of this very type of problem.
A further idea. Since it seems Nico is willing to help on this, maybe you two could get together and divide the task? Many hands make light work, and all that. And please make sure everything is figured out before starting, just to be on the safe side.
DeleteGreat - this blog software is not the best place to discuss technical details, sorry for some slight confusion... I'll write to your email in about an hour and send you samples so that you can see.
DeleteWhat Nico does is something pretty different - I think he creates PDF files will all of the formatting and pictures. That seriously involves opening all (1000+) pages in a browser to create the visuals and then export it into a PDF. What I'm now doing is simply to extract the plain description texts to add to each release as a kind of "read me".
invi - Exactly, that's what I do. And your description of the task going my way is completely accurate. And I would not be able to include neither tags nor comments. But still available if you want me to!
DeleteDoes anyone have any feedback on the second part of my original post, how to avoid the spam at upload.ee? I just got this comment from someone on a different album:
ReplyDeleteCurrent download link installed over a dozen unwanted programs on my PC. Not cool.
Paul, I also enjoy your write-ups and will copy-paste the info to a text file. It is simple and easy to do. I have noticed all the tagged information in your files; that is an extra effort that can be kind of a chore. Thanks for including that as well
ReplyDelete