I rip all CDs, vinyl and cassettes to flac for easier listening, but I also convert the files to mp3 for listening in the car, which has an mp3 CD player. This is what the display normally looks like:
But all the files that I’ve ripped from vinyl are displayed like this:
I’ve been assuming that my vinyl ripping tool chain just hasn’t been inserting id3 tags into the mp3 files for years, and that the car mp3 player was just displaying random data. But yesterday I finally remembered to check the tool chain, and it does insert id3 tags into those files, too.
So, while pondering this deeply serious and puzzling issue, I started looking at id3 tools. I wanted one that could just output all the id3 data in a machine-readable format, so that I could, perhaps, figure out what it was about certain files that made the car stereo not like them.
And I couldn’t find a single one. I installed at least five different ones, and they were all so charmingly human oriented. Phooey.
If I managed to discover what the problem was, I was going to have to re-tag all the problematic mp3 files, and I wanted that to be a process that could be automated, so I need machine-readable output.
Instead of continuing down that rabbit hole, I just wrote an id3 parser in Emacs instead. And what the problem was because obvious on the first file I parsed:
The group name starts with “\377\376M^@”… That’s utf-16 (or ucs-2) with a Byte Order Mark!
Interpreted as the iso-8859-1 Latin-1 charset, that would just be “ÿþM”, because it would think the string terminated at the first nul byte.
D’oh.
So the version of the Lame mp3 encoder on my vinyl ripping computer writes utf-16 tags, while the CD ripping computer writes iso-8859-1 tags. And my car only understands the latter.
Mystery solved.
But when I’ve written the id3 parser, I thought I could just finish the job and write an id3 mode, too, to allow viewing and editing the id3 data. It’s a bit scary, altering the mp3 files themselves, so I’d handle this with care. In fact, I would recommend not actually testing this mode for writing data. But it kinda seems to work for me. Slightly.
Here’s what it looks like on an mp3 file that has an embedded image inside:
Kinda basic, but should be a starting point if somebody wants to experiment more…
IDW announced last year that they were going to translate and publish a complete set of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese (in English translation). There was much rejoicing across the land. I haven’t read those comics for decades, since they were stuck at my parent’s house up in the North, so I thought “what they hey” and bought the first volume, Under the Sign of Capricorn.
But this Xmas holiday it struck me that I could, like, just start shipping the comics up there down here so that I could re-read … all that stuff … So I started packing.
After six boxes of 20kg each I stopped, because comics are heavy and I recalled that I live on the fourth floor, no elevator, and I’m lazy.
But included in those first six boxes were all the Corto Maltese albums published in Danish and Swedish back in the 80s, so I thought it might be slightly interesting to compare the new editions to the old ones. I’m doing this on my comics reading couch for added versimilitude instead of doing scans.
So, first of all: That cover.
That is ugly. That’s just ugly.
In addition to choosing a pretty weird drawing of Corto Maltese here, there are just so many other bad things going on here. Let me linger on this ugliness for an unreasonable amount of time and pictures:
There’s a drop shadow behind Corto
There a compass thing that’s very busy in an of itself with all the pointy spokes in the background in addition to the Nato logo in the front. And then there’s the title with a drop shadow onto the compass, and then “Corto Maltese” and “Hugo Pratt” on the compass itself. At least they used the same font, even though the font is butt ugly.
The teal background has both a map and a ship (and some seagulls) imposed onto the map.
There’s a totally unnecessary border around most of the cover.
It’s fun to see the old Eclipse logo make a reappearance, but even here they just can’t keep it simple. There’s the awkward “O” in “EURO” that’s reversed halfway through; there’s all that itty-bitty text underneath it, and as if that wasn’t enough, at the bottom right-hand corner they’ve stuck the Library of American Comics (!) logo. At least that’s what I think it is — it’s so tiny. And these are “EURO COMICS”. Wha?
The cover looks like somebody with attention deficit disorder went mad in Photoshop for fifteen minutes.
Seriously.
Here’s what the Danish version looked like in 1982:
Peace. Tranquility. Beautiful.
Ok, enough with the cover, already. Get ready for some innards. By now I was cringing, expecting the worst…
Ok… It’s not restrained or anything, but the compass makes more sense here. It’s not very Hugo Pratt, though, but it’s not awful.
Hey, that’s nice. Even included Pratt’s very handsome signature.
Wow. Did they use a complety different designer on the innards of the book? That’s pretty excellent.
And then the story itself starts. What does it look like?
The printing looks really nice and crisp. However, they’ve used a semi-glossy paper stock, which means that you have to keep shifting the page around to be able to read it, because the light makes reflections. It’s not as shiny as many other modern reprint projects, but it’s still not… good.
But when you angle the paper just right, it looks really nice. The ink is nice and black, and the paper is just slightly off-white. It’s perfectly acceptable.
The Danish version from 1982 is more washed out, but is printed on completely matte paper. So that’s a tie, I guess. I do think the new printing is perhaps a bit busier than intended. All those lines that were probably intended as barely visible skritches (compare the lines in the woodwork and the lines in Corto’s brow in the two versions), and these small lines are now solid, with even width. It looks like whoever digitised this applied a thresholding function that makes all the lines look stark. More lines mo better, perhaps, but…
Let me digress a bit about a subject that is, strictly speaking, totally irrelevant here:
These days, most reprint projects of European albums have a tendency to stick a lot of albums together into a great whopping book. European albums are mostly in the 40-60 page range, and selling anything less than 120 pages is apparently impossible these days.
But sticking separate stories together into one volume changes the way they read.
Most European albums are separate works that have a definite beginning and ending. After reading one, you feel you’ve experienced something complete. Sticking several of these works together into one volume changes that experience. When the next story starts three pages later, there’s a compulsion to continue reading, but more importantly, when you have 60 pages left in the book when you’re reading the end of a story, it doesn’t really feel like the end of a story.
It’s like if films were realeased with a two second pause between “The End” and then the next film the director did starting. American comics are often more serially oriented, and presenting collections of those works fine, as does collections of TV series. But doing the same with most European comics changes the reading experience, and not for the better.
But like I said, that rant is irrelevant here, because this book is a collection of six related stories, so just forget what I just said.
As is the norm, though, this volume is over 120 pages, while the 80s edition comes in two volumes:
Oh, and there’s the cover of the second 80s volume:
Kinda purdy, that one too. I mean, not as good as the first volume, but still way better than the IDW cover.
Oh, and what’s the stories like? They’re fantastic, of course, and if you haven’t read them already, you should run out to your nearest comic book store and buy one immediately. Then rip off the cover, put it in the paper recycling, and then read the stories.
I was expecting the films to become crappier as years passed, but that turned out not to be true. I started in 1968, my birth year, and the 70s were kinda rough for US and British film making.
I didn’t see many films during (say) 1998-2010. So my selection of films from g_monte’s lists may have led me to see films that I normally would already have seen, like Being John Malkovich, Little Miss Sunshine and Brokeback Mountain (because they’re, like, good films, that anybody interested if movies would have watched).
But US and British films in the 70s were kinda crappy. At least according to the selections I made here. O Lucky Man, 3 Women and Saint Jack, for instance. Sweaty and dull.
So! Films are getting better! I think that’s what the research shows.
Here’s some stats:
British, US and similar: 31 films French, Belgian and similar: 11 films Other: 2
Is that 47 in total? Hm… Might have missed some… But I guess that g_monte either likes French cinema more than … other cinema, or I wasn’t able to get the other options. Actually, he (or she) listed a lot of East Asian films, but those were impossible to buy. So this might just mean that the French are better at getting their films out on DVD. For which I’m grateful.
So… what other statistics could I easily gather? Er… Uh… Oh, let’s do director gender. (Based on guessing names. Céline is a woman’s name, right?)
I saw Funny Games on TV some… decades? ago, and I thought it was vile. I switched it off after about half an hour. I switched back to the channel more than an hour later, thinking it would be safe, and caught the final boating scene. Aaargh.
I’ve hated Haneke ever since for putting me through those thirty minutes.
Haneke was interviewed in the Paris Review last year, and here’s him talking about Funny Games:
“I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t derive great pleasure from this provocation, but it s not what I’m after in general. In any case, nothing infuriates me more than hypocrisy. There were many people who stayed in the cinema to then end and then complained that it was such a scandal and whatnot. I would say to them, Then why did you stay? Why didn’t you leave? No, be honest, you get off on the violence, and that’s why you stayed.”
This isn’t even sophomoric. It’s kindergarten. “Stop hitting yourself.” But then he added:
“If someone genuinely thought the film was shit and left the cinema, I would shake his hand and say, Congratulations, well done, your are completely right. I would’ve walked out, too, you know.”
Ok, fine. Perhaps I should watch another Haneke film before hating him that much.
I thought this film was going to be manipulative as hell. And it is. But the actors are so fantastic that the feeling of social pornography doesn’t constantly overwhelm. But I’m still not convinced that Haneke isn’t just an asshole.
But all the files that I’ve ripped from vinyl are displayed like this:
I’ve been assuming that my vinyl ripping tool chain just hasn’t been inserting id3 tags into the mp3 files for years, and that the car mp3 player was just displaying random data. But yesterday I finally remembered to check the tool chain, and it does insert id3 tags into those files, too.
If I managed to discover what the problem was, I was going to have to re-tag all the problematic mp3 files, and I wanted that to be a process that could be automated, so I need machine-readable output.
The group name starts with “\377\376M^@”… That’s utf-16 (or ucs-2) with a Byte Order Mark!
Kinda basic, but should be a starting point if somebody wants to experiment more…
