Archive for July, 2009

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.