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Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Apple

Pollux tags your music files in iTunes so you don't have to

PolluxPollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.

Filed under: Fun, Freeware, Time-Wasters, Web

Create random album covers - Time Waster

My Album GeneratorCreating compelling album cover art requires talent, though when I look through my old CD collection (how quaint!) it's pretty clear that talent is not a prerequisite for everyone who creates album covers. For a fun comparison, check out how surprisingly well My Album Generator creates passable album covers.

The formula is simple: choose to use either a random Wikipedia article or a simple adjective + noun for the name of your band, and a recent random photo from either Flickr or Photobucket. Currently album titles are pulled from quotationspage.com. Lastly, choose whether you want to create a "Metal" band album cover, the only effect of which appears to be adding umlauts over vowels randomly.

It takes only a few seconds to try, and you'll probably end up with a few good ones rather quickly. Here are a couple of my favorites: Spectral Mandible, Peoria Panorama, Puffy Jello, and Buddy Liles.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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