So a few weeks ago I got it in my head that I should share with the world my MP3 collection. I figured it would be interesting, be good for me so that I could keep track of it myself, hopefully generate some income for me, and it would allow me to constantly be adding content to my website since I am always getting new music. The search engines love web pages that update often. I also hoped that viewers would find it interesting and I am including the album cover for all of my albums and I am sure there are people out there like me and it can be a serious pain in the butt trying to find pictures of some of those rare album covers.

This project really made me wish I knew some programming language like perl. If I knew perl or something this whole process could have been much less painless and much more automated but I don’t know it so I had to make do with something else.

Luckily for me I found a program called MP3 HTML Generator which did the bulk of the work for me. I still had to do a LOT of work though. I have pretty much been working on this project day and night for the last three weeks. I mean that literally too, for many of the days in the last three weeks I have been working on this from the time I got up till I went to bed. One thing I definitely am is persistant.

The way MP3 HTML Generator works is you tell it where you have your MP3 files stored it reads through your collection and using your ID3 tags it spits out the HTML source code for you. There are several different templates you can use and you can use your own templates as well (but they are kind of limited). I ended up using a portal type interface for mine which to me makes the most sense. The other style all seem to just spit out a really long list of your entire collection and the portal style first gives you a list of all your artists, you select and artist and it shows you all the albums you have for that artist and then you select an album and it shows you all the songs on that album.

Here are some examples of the different styles that MP3 HTML Generator can do for you.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

And here is the portal example, the style that I used.

Example 4

I have nearly 200gigs of MP3′s, over 30,000 of them so as you can probably imagine this was a daunting project.

When all was said and done MP3 HTML Generator created just shy of 3,000 new HTML pages. Now because of the limitations in the program I had to go in and edit each and every one of these pages.

MP3 HTML Generator allowed me to do this project and I wouldn’t have attempted this project without it. That said the program could definitely use some improvements. You are allowed to use your own templates but you are limited to having the program just stick the code into one place in your template, you just put the following line in your code

< !-- BODY_TEMPLATE_PAGE -- >

And the HTML that is generated is just stuck in your page there. The program would be incredibly more useful if you could make the artist names appear where you wanted it just by putting something like <#artist#> on the page, that way you could put the artist up in the title of the page, in the H1 tags, etc. You should be able to do this will all attributes such as title, genre, length, year, album cover, etc. If this program did this I would have been in heaven.

Another thing that would make this program much, much better would be customizable URLs. As it is right now the program just makes the URLs in sequential order so all of your generated pages are something like music_01.html, music_02.html. music_03.html etc. It would be absolutely fantastic if it used your file structure for the url. That way you would have URLs that looked like music/audioslave/revelations.html or something to that effect, this would make this program worth a fortune to me.

The program is also a bit buggy. You assign the album covers to the MP3s within the program, I had it randomly inserting covers in the improper place. The program was also too smart for it’s own good. On soundtracks and Various Artists CDs it wouldn’t allow me to assign the cover to the entire album in one shot because the artist name didn’t match up. This was EXTREMELY annoying as I had to do each track individually.

If you are looking to take on a project like this I can recommend that you use MP3 HTML Generator because it seems to be the best thing out there but realize that you will most likely run into some limitations. If you know perl or another language and you happen to write a better program PLEASE let me know, especially if you happen to incorporate any of the things I mentioned above that this program is lacking.

Here is the final result of the last three weeks of hard work:

Moe’s Massive MP3 Collection

Let me preface this post by saying I cannot take a good picture to save my life. I swear, 98% of all pictures taken of me absolutely suck, I cannot smile on demand for some reason, I am just retarded like that. I am also a big fat whale of a person and that is going to be fixed very shortly.

Since my recent unemployment the need to shave has gone way down on my list of priorities. On my list of things to do before I die one of the things was to grow a beard so I decided to just go ahead and do it. I hadn’t shaved since I got back from Japan, and I probably didn’t shave the last couple days I was in Japan either so I had some good growth going.

My facial hair, hell, all the hair on my head is pretty thin so I can’t grow the worlds greatest beard but I pulled something that resembled a beard off. Anyway here is a picture of the beard.

God I hate pictures of myself, and that one is probably the best one of the bunch here. I was headed out to Christmas dinner at my brothers in-laws so I decided to clean up and shave it all off. I decided to have a bit of fun first and shaved down to a goatee. It didn’t look too bad, just not thick enough and not really me. Here is me with a goat.

I then decided to see if I could ever pursue a career in law enforcement and went down to just a moustache. I think there are probably about 11 men on the planet that can pull off just having a moustache, I am obviously not one of those men. It looked absolutely ridiculous.

If you are a Scrubs fan then I am sure you will get a kick out of this, it’s really well done. For you non Scrubs fans, I am not sure how this will go over with you, you will still probably find it funny though.

This guy is obviously some sort of ninja.

I am having a bit of a hard time getting back on California time after my trip to Japan.

The first day I got home I had left Japan at 7:00PM Japan time and landed here in CA at 10:30AM. I was able to force myself, with a bit of difficulty, to stay up till 10:00PM that night before I crashed. I slept like a rock that first night and slept till 12:30PM the next day. I was hoping that doing that would get me pretty close to being back on track, I was wrong. That night I went to bed around 2:00AM, fell asleep probably around 3:00AM and woke back up around 4:00AM. When I woke up, before looking at the clock, I thought I had been asleep for at least 6 hours so I was quite surprised to see it had only been an hour, I was also wide awake. I tried falling back asleep but it was futile, I finally got out of bed around 6:00AM and started doing stuff around the house. By the time 10:00AM rolled around I was exhausted so I lied down to take a nap, before I knew it it was 4:00PM. I was screwed.

I tried going to bed around 3:00 that night but it was worthless, I couldn’t fall asleep to save my life. I tried taking a couple advil and drinking some milk but that didn’t do a damn thing. I ended up being awake till 10:30AM before I was able to fall asleep, I set my alarm for 1:00PM but I some how turned it off and didn’t get up. I ended up waking up at 5:00PM, things are really looking up for me here.

I was determined to not have a repeat of yesterday’s performance the next night, I didn’t mind what time I fell asleep. I can’t really make myself fall asleep when I am not tired so if I was going to catch up on sleep it most likely meant cutting some sleep short so I would get tired earlier the next sleep cycle. I ended up being awake all night again and finally was able to fall asleep at 9:00AM. I set my alarm before I fell asleep though. My alarm went off at 1:30PM and this time I didn’t turn it off, I did snooze till 2:00PM but I was making progress, I only got 5 hours of sleep.

This brings us up to last night. I went to bed around 3:30AM and was actually able to fall asleep relatively quickly, I was probably asleep by 4:00-4:30AM. Unfortunately for me, I slept till 2:00PM. I didn’t have this much trouble in Japan and everyone told me that it was easier to get back on track than adjust to the new time zone, I think they are filthy liars. I just want to go back to falling asleep between 1:00-2:00AM and getting up around 8:00-9:00AM.

Maybe I should just drink myself into a stupor so that I pass out early one night.

This is probably the most subtle one that I have done, hope you like it.

Here is the image I started with, can you spot the seven changes I made?

Click Here for bigger versions of the original and the changed images

I am home from Japan safe and sound. I have been writing up on my trip over at moesrealm.com The links are up yet so if you want to see it go to here. Days 1 through 13 are up right now and I plan on finishing up the rest over the next couple of days. Please note that the pages linked to above are pretty rough, they haven’t been proofread and some of them still need pictures and details filled in. I am just giving my readers here a bit of a sneak peak. I will make another post when things are up for real.

The trip was really amazing and I can’t wait to go back. I actually got home yesterday but I was stupidly tired. I took off from Japan at 7:00PM on Monday and landed in San Francisco at 10:30AM Monday. I wasn’t really able to sleep on the plane so by the time I had landed I had been up for about 19 hours, I really wanted to get back on CA time ASAP so I stayed up till ten last night when I crashed hard. I slept till 12:30 this afternoon, hopefully it won’t take me long to get back on CA time, it took me nearly a week to get on Japan time.

Anyway, I am glad to be home but I had an incredible time and drank a boat load of beer.