Sorting out my digital music mess with Pollux

I have been thoroughly addicted to digital music for several years now. In fact it is all too easy to forget just how revolutionary the iPod and its successors have been. Who would have thought, even ten years ago, that many of us would be walking around with our entire music collection at our fingertips?

However, even iTunes, Windows Media Player and other music software have their failings. In particular they are not good at recognising individual music tracks in terms of artist and album source. I have wasted many hours in the past manually inputting their details onto my computer so I can find the right track amongst my 5,000 songs.

Needless to say it was only a matter of time before an ingenious young whippersnapper of a programmer solved this annoyance. In this instance it was three undergraduate students from Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Karnataka (Chetan Surpur, Second year undergrad at U.C. Berkeley, California. Shashwat Kandadai, Second year undergrad at U.C. Santa Cruz, California. Manoj Mardithaya, Third year undergrad at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India.)

Together they have created Pollux, which was initially discovered by net@night with Amber and Leo. The first version was Mac only, but just last week I downloaded the Windows version. I went straight for the full version at $10 for a year, instead of the free trial. It took my computer around 24 hours to work its way through my entire music collection. But, now I have a full set of tagged songs, with album art to go with them, and I am very grateful to Chetan, Shashwat and Manoj.

Amendment: I just discovered on my way home this evening that this service also downloads the lyrics of songs. Finally I can read what my current favourite artist Regina Spektor is singing about; ‘I have dreams of orca whales and owls, But I wake up in fear‘. Even if I don’t understand what she means.

Never worry about organizing your music library again
Completely automatic and easy to use
Tags name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics
Analyses the track’s unique fingerprint, so it can never be wrong
No existing track information necessary
Automatically corrects each track’s information as it is added to iTunes

http://polluxapp.com/images/starbackground.jpg

Pollux (star) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pollux
(β Gem / β Geminorum / Beta Geminorum) is an orange giant star approximately 34 light-years from the Earth

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