Why do people specify data with fixed width fields? I've been playing with DoSomething, a WinAmp plugin. It does one very simple thing - an HTTP GET on a configurable URL with the name of the song I'm playing, artist, etc. Sounds great! I wrote a CGI to keep track of the songs I'm playing.

DoSomething only works with ID3v1 tags, not ID3v2. And the Einstein who defined ID3v1 decided that 31 characters was plenty for the title of every song written. So my CGI sees truncated titles.

I spent 20 minutes trying to find another Winamp plugin that would do HTTP messages with ID3v2 tags. No. The closest I found was What's Playing, which looks nice but requires WinAmp 3 and doesn't do HTTP.

I'm wasting my time.

techbad
  2003-02-22 02:59 Z