Splitting mp3/cue files into multiple mp3 files

Usually you encode single MP3 files for each track on a CD. But there are cases when it’s sensible to encode the whole CD as one MP3 file. This is usually done, when you have a continuos live album where you want to avoid gaps between the tracks und preserve the original timecodes of the CD. In these cases you create a single MP3 file and a CUE file which contains the timecodes and track names for the single tracks in the MP3.

When you later like to split thes MP3/CUE files into individial MP3 files you need a specialized tool. Lately I used Medieval CUE Splitter to achieve this. It is a small freeware application which splits the MP3 and even fill the ID3-Tags from the information in the CUE files.

“Continue later” for filling out Google Docs Forms

Google Docs/Spreadsheets forms can be used easily as a simple survey tool. You just have to send a link to the participants who have to fill out and submit the form. The only problem: The forms have to be filled out in one go, you can not come back later and continue editing the form. Of cause this is particularly bad when you a have a really long questionnaire.

On way to provide the “continue later” functionality is to use a tool that saves your web browser’s form state. Lazarus: Form Recovery is one of those tools for Firefox that constantly saves the state of your web forms and allows you to load previous content when you return to a website. This works very well with Google Docs Forms. You can interrupt filling out the form at any time, return later and restore the information you previously entered with a few clicks.

IndexedList: A hybrid of a Java List and a Map

If been working on legacy data import code in the last months with a lot of code searching for exisiting objects in lists. I realized I needed a different collection to speed up searching for identifiers and couldn’t find any standard collection that matches my needs. I basically need an index like Maps.uniqueIndex() from the Google Collections Library provides but it should be updating dynamically and not only be generated once.

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techbits’ back

I had to bring techbits back from the dead – I have lots more to say. I know that I rarely find time to write long and carefully crafted articles but I’d rather contine posting short notes twitter style than not posting at all.

WordPress is updated, a new fresh theme is installed, now I’m going to update some about data and clean up the sidebar. Expect upcoming posts about Java, Alfresco, GWT and some general development topics that cross my mind.