For the geeks!

For the geeks!

Here are some utilities that I find very useful:

• mp3tag: I have been using this for more than a year now and this is, by far, one of the best mp3 tagging utilities I have come across. It allows a very intuitive and easy editing of ID3 tags for audio files and supports more than just mp3s. Not only does it allow you to derive ID3 from the file name, but once you have the ID3s refined, you can derive the file names using the ID3. Must try utility! Thanks to mp3tag, my audio library is as good as it can get. Link to the website.


• MKS Toolkit: UNIX on Windows! Guess that says it all. grep and make to your heart's content! Link to the website.


• cURL, WGET: Ever wanted to save multiple images or songs or other files from one website. cURL or WGET is the tool you want. These are command line utilities that spider out into the web to retrieve files/web pages for specified URLs. You can decide how deep you want to go into a site. It can stop at the first level or follow links from the first level to the next one and so on.
  
  Here is an usage example. Lets say you are an Aishwarya Rai fan and you come across a site such as this one. Instead of right clicking on each one to do a "Save As...", use cURL or WGET to recursively run through the site to retrieve the files.
  
  The command to accomplish this is a single line:
  cURL http://www.bollywoodscreensavers.com/wallpapers/indceleb/imgs/Aishwarya[01-10].jpg -o "Ash#1.jpg".
  
  This will recursively pull the files Aishwarya01.jpg, Aishwarya02.jpg... and save them in the local machine as Ash01.jpg, Ash02.jpg...
  
  For the Ash fan, my example pulls only 10 images, but the site has over 60 Aishwarya images! For the music fan, if you come across a site with plenty of mp3s (non-copyrighted), here is how you can easily get them. ;)
  
  Link to the websites: cURL, WGET and WGET for Windows.
  

Plenty more such as Slickrun, but I will leave that for another day!