Month: April 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

Another post in my continuing saga to collect quality, offline music to play in my car. For more details, see my previous posts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I’ve made a few revisions lately to the code I wrote to inventory my music collection–over 300 albums and over 4000 songs–and write select songs to a USB stick for playing in my car.

Dealing with odd characters unfriendly to PowerShell

Several of my filepaths including characters with brackets, ampersands, and the like that don’t seem particularly friendly to some of the PowerShell commands I use. In particular Select-Object -Unique does not seem fond of strings with these types of characters in them. To circumvent this issue, I’ve found that if I encode those strings before performing the Unique operation on them, I can avoid a certain amount of pain. However, I’ve also found that Shell’s Namespace method is not fond of escaped characters. So, immediately after I produce my unique set of folders to process, I unencode those strings:

$mp3_folders = dir "$music_folder\*.mp3" -Recurse | where {$dirs_to_exclude -notcontains $_.Directory.FullName} | select Directory | %{[RegEx]::Escape($_.Directory)} | select -Unique | %{[RegEx]::Unescape($_)}

Adding additional fields

Previously, I was only collecting the “contributing artist”; however, there is also an “album artist” field, so I added that to my inventory, as well. Often, there might be multiple people or bands listed as contributing artists for a single song, however, usually, the album artist is just the band or the singer who released the CD. Differentiating these two values can be helpful when you start to filter down just what music you want on your thumb drive.

Writing my inventory to a CSV file instead of a JSON file

In my first version of the inventory script, I produced a JSON file representing my music inventory. That’s not necessarily a bad approach; however, if I write my inventory out as a CSV file instead, I can then easily open that file in Excel and start to quality check the metadata in my music files.

Making sure to encode my inventory file as UTF8

I have a fair amount of foreign artists in my collection using accented letters and the like. Encoding my inventory as UTF8 will properly preserve these characters.

Filtering on both album artists and albums

My music collection includes music my children enjoy–much of which I find annoying. For example, I don’t enjoy singing along to the Smurfs soundtrack while stuck in rush hour traffic. So, I’ve added logic to my “copy” script to not only filter out particular artists I don’t want to hear in the car but also filter out specific albums, as well.

Filtering on spoken word audio

I have a few CDs that include speeches or interviews of the artists, such as The Beatles Anthology. Personally, I’d rather hear The Beatles’s music over a speech or interview, so I do my best to filter such audio out of my playlist by excluding any song who’s title includes the word speech. I should probably extend that logic to include the word interview, also.

$mp3s_to_write_to_drive = $music_collection | where {$genres_to_include -contains $_.genre} | where {$album_artists_to_exclude -notcontains $_.album_artist} | 
    where {$albums_to_exclude -notcontains $_.album} | where {$_.song -notlike "*speech*"} | sort {random}

For these improvements and more, check out my new versions here.

Every week, my team has a status meeting where we spend part of the time going around our virtual meeting room getting updates from each team member. To try to keep things fair, my manager attempts to randomly pick the next team member to give his or her update. If she really wanted to be fair, she’d simply run this PowerShell command every week:

"Larry","Moe","Curly","Doc","Sneazy","Grumpy"|sort {random}

Here, I start with an array of my team members.: Larry, Moe, Curly, Doc, Sneazy, and Grumpy. I pipe that array to the Sort-Object cmdlet. The “random” portion of the sort command basically tells the sort to sort the list according to the large random number that is generated. This doesn’t feel completely random to me and I’m not sure it would work well for teams larger than nine people, but it certainly works better than drawing names out of a hat–or the manager’s head, for that matter.

Hat tip to this blog post for the inspiration.