Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with track

Is there a track set without batteries or winding?

rahnefan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:58:23 -0800

Is there a track set for Hot Wheels that doesn't require batteries or winding or special cars? My kids have gotten really into Hot Wheels. Seems I remember having had a track set on which my brother and I used to race our normal, unmotorized cars by using some sort of lever-controlled action (meant to resemble a gear shifter?), and none of it required batteries or winding or special cars if I recall correctly. Kinda like slinging a plane from an aircraft carrier only it's a car, and is meant to stay on the track rather than fly.

I checked hotwheels.com and found it entirely unhelpful. They have one of the trick sets but those don't loop, they just set off a series of actions. Trick tracks I am not interested in. I'm looking for something continuous, possibly with a loop. Their "starter set" is motorized, which I find disappointing.

Did I invent this memory and if not, is there nothing like that available now? It can be made by anyone if a standard diecast car will fit the track.

Can I force the new iTunes visualizer to ALWAYS display the current track info? Failing that, any recommended alternative visualizations?

thisisnotbruce — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:18:23 -0800

Can I force the new iTunes visualizer (magnetosphere) to ALWAYS display the current track info? Failing that, any recommended alternative visualizations for iTunes on Windows? I really like the updated visualizer that comes with iTunes these days and like to have the visualizer displaying on my monitor / TV / projector at home while I'm doing other work.

What often happens is that I or somebody else is curious on what track is playing, leading me to either rush over to my computer to check or annoying rack my brain for the answer. It would be great, instead, all I have to do is turn my head.

The new visualizer doesn't have to option to "Always Display Song Info" like the classic visualizer does. So I'm thinking I'll need an alternative iTunes visualization.

Are there any out there that are similar to the new iTunes visualizer (magnetosphere) with the option to "Always Display Song Info"? Note that I'm on Windows XP.

An app to track completions?

phritosan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:37:17 -0800

An app for that? I want to give my iPhone a list of things I want to collect data on. "How many of the last n days have I completed x" is exactly want I want to know. It's not a goal, it's not a habit, I'm not trying to hit a target weight, and I'm not trying to quit smoking. Touch Goal is close to what I want, but it has a horrible interface.

GoalKeep is close to what I want, but I don't want to drop $4 if there is a better choice that gets it all correct. The calendar with check marks is a step up from Touch Goal, but I cannot track that I did something more than once in a day like Touch Goal does.

Habit Factor and HabitCheck are not what I want. I don't want it to hold my hand, I don't want encouragement, I don't need quotes.

I have a to-do app that I'm happy with. I don't want a list app with check boxes I clear each day. I have a calendar program I'm happy with.

I want to track data.

Best online diet and workout dairy?

Aya — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:50:10 -0800

Looking for the best websites to track my diet / exercise / weight.

Odometer/pace calibration?

Rad_Boy — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:06:25 -0800

How far on a school track is a mile? I would like to use the nearby middle school’s “oval” track to help me calibrate my bike’s odometer as well as my own walking/hiking pace. As I think all the schools in the US are, it is a “metric” track. What I would like to know is how far to travel on this track to reach exactly one mile. There are a bewildering number of markings (lines, triangles, etc.) on the track and I’m not so sure that there would even be any markings that would indicate one mile. Perhaps some of the readers have tackled this problem before and could share their advice?

Seeking alternative file manager

mairuzu — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:40:10 -0800

I need a free file manager for Windows XP that will allow me to specify the order in which files are physically written to an SD Card. Specifically - if i have a folder of music containing, say, 32 tracks of varying length, I want to be able to instruct the file manager to complete the copying of them over according to something like the file name (if each track title was prefixed by the track number) - The order in which Windows Explorer seems to complete copying seems to be based purely on how long each track takes - i.e. shorter tracks copy over sooner than longer tracks due to their file size. Any recommendations of free options gratefully received. CONTINUE READING FOR MORE SPECIFIC DETAILS OF WHY I NEED THIS:

I have recently bought a new card stereo (A Blaupunkt Melbourne) with an SD card slot - it's great.

However, after a bit of head scratching, I have worked out that when it plays back MP3 tracks from a particular folder it plays them back in the order they were written to the card.

For example, I have an album of ten tracks in a folder, I drag the folder onto the SD card in Windows Explorer. If tracks 3 and 10 are the shortest tracks (smallest files) they will complete copying over first and they will effectively be treated as tracks 1 & 2 by the car stereo.

It seems to make no difference how the tracks are named.

It's quiet annoying as it means that to listen to an album in the correct order, I have to drag each file over individually!

Mood Setting Music

spacefire — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:54:05 -0800

Where can I find free music that can generate a certain mood? I'm looking for tracks, preferably ten minutes or longer, which can evoke certain feelings. Like, if I'm feeling stressed out, I can play a track that would calm me down. Or something inspiring if I need to start work or something.
Does such music exist?

Help me remember the name of a website that records all tracks recently played by almost any radio station.

DeltaForce — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:17:53 -0800

Help me remember the name of a website that records all tracks recently played by almost any radio station. A while ago I came across a website that would track all songs played within a certain time period, eliminating the need to go to individual radio stations' websites. I can't remember what the website was called, any ideas?

Thanks!

How can I automatically split GPS tracklogs?

komilnefopa — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:04:28 -0800

I have almost a year's worth of GPS track logs. I'd like to be able to automatically split them by trip type (walking, biking, car) and filter out some of the noise that gets generated when leaving the GPS on while stationary. Over the past several months I've been using my GPS to track where I go. The raw track logs I get are generally pretty accurate, but often while I'm out I'll switch back and forth between walking, biking, and the car/bus/train. My GPS unit (Garmin 60CSx) doesn't generally split tracks when I change modes of transportation. Also, sometimes I forget to turn the GPS off when I'm inside or standing still; because the GPS isn't 100% accurate, this creates a noisy track that looks like random wandering around the same point.

Given a list of tracks in GPX or some other standard format that's supported by gpsbabel, I'd like to be able to take each track and break it at each point where my average speed changes by a certain configurable threshold. I'd also like to be able to detect when I've stopped somewhere and remove all points that were generated while I was stopped.

I've hacked together something in Python that works on a rudimentary level (the geolocator library has been especially helpful), but it's not perfect. I also haven't implemented anything that gets rid of the random wandering. I could probably figure out how to do this, but it occurred to me that this is probably a solved problem and that I could save time by not re-inventing the wheel.

Does anyone know of any software with intelligent track splitting and noise removal? Previous questions have mentioned GPS TrackMaker, but it doesn't seem to meet these requirements. Failing that, algorithms or pseudocode would be helpful as well.

I need a Time Tracker that nags me or just an app to nag me.

drinkspiller — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:03:54 -0800

I need a Time Tracker that nags me or just an app to nag me. I've searched past ask me-fi threads and am aware of the multitude of web, widget, desktop and offline time tracking apps and methods. I'm having trouble finding one to nag me on a configurable schedule. For example, every hour or so between 8am and 6 pm I'd like something to remind me to track time. At that point, I could jot notes on paper or in a text file or whatever, but if the nagging app could facilitate jotting down what I've been working on and for which job, so much the better. I don't need reporting or any other features, just a nag, then a place to enter a job number and task note. I'm using Windows. I could set up a recurring calendar event in Outlook to do the nagging (and the ability to snooze an Outlook reminder is a plus), but I'm seeking a possibly more integrated alternative that is better suited for the task. Thanks for the insight, hive mind!

Un-tattooed Olympians?

chookibing — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:53:40 -0800

Are competitors in the Beijing Olympics required to cover up or mute their tattoos? Or is my mind playing tricks on me. Every person that I've seen with a tattoo looks like its been at least partially covered with makeup. Mostly I've seen this in the track and weightlifting events.

GPS track management

primer_dimer — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:25:48 -0800

looking for software/webapp for GPS track management So I'm getting started with GPS tracking, my aim being similar to this askme question - to record my own tracks as a kind of prosthesis for my appalling memory. I'm starting to think about the next step - actually extracting useful information from those records. As a hypothetical example, let's say I have recorded my position every 10 minutes for a year. Where is the software that will allow me to ask questions like:

- how many visits did I make to the supermarket
- how many hours a day did I spend at work, on average
- what was my average commute time (to the nearest 10 minutes, obviously)
- how many days in total did I spend in the Lake District, spread out over multiple trips

Now it seems to me that this shouldn't be too hard from a programming point of view. I should be able to click on a map and tell a piece of software that this location is "work", this is "home", etc.

And I should be able to say that a journey between "home" and "work" is a regular one and give it a name "commute". Or it should be possible to convert GPS co-ordinates to useful place names by extracting the data from a map - to work out which data points correspond to "Manchester", etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Google maps can do something like that.

So my question is; does such a program/webapp exist? It seems like this kind of data should be ideal for the a kind of stats-heavy app like Mint/Google Analytics etc. that could automatically generate interesting graphs - e.g. time spent in different cities, time spent on different journeys, etc. The closest thing I've found is sites like motionbased.com, that are geared towards running, cycling etc. Or is this problem computationally impossible for some reason I don't understand?

Dear Fashion Diary

mathlete — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:25:54 -0800

Is there a site out there that can help me keep track of what I wear? I'd like to look at my clothes-wearing habits, such as how often I wear something or when the last time I wore something was, and I thought there might be some software or a web site that could help with this out there already.

I haven't found anything remotely close to what I'm looking for with Google. I saw this previous question, but the discussion there is more about whether an outfit is good or bad; I'm looking for a different kind of analysis.

Someone took a picture / of Kate Moss doing lines / Now she's being victimized / for imaginary crimes

TheNewWazoo — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:33:23 -0800

Does anyone have a good download link for the entirety of thepartyparty's tracks? I remember I used to have 8 or 9 different remixes, but the website seems to have whittled that down to only 5, and with no clean download links. I need my "Dick is a Killer"!

Baby-tracking

gomichild — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:12:23 -0800

Babyweb 2.0 - looking for an online app/site to keep track of baby's feeding/pooping etc schedule. Google calendar and iCal are too tedious to update, do not want to do with a spreadsheet or *gasp* pen and paper. Or overblown software.

Ideally you would just have the day with times and be able to quickly add pre-designated events (say feeding) and possibly some extra details (80 mls formula) etc.

Does this exist? What is a quick solution for tracking these things?

Identify this concert/track for me!

Artw — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:30:03 -0800

On BBC Radio 6 a few days ago, probably sometime late at night or early in the morning in British time (I was listening in the afternoon in the US) they were playing a concert recording of an artist who’s volcal style resembled a less coherent Amy Winehouse. One of the songs used part of tchaichovskys Romeo and Juliet for a hook, and it was all mostly soul/R&B type music. Any ideas what it was?

Hit me with the hot beats!

jstef — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:10:35 -0800

Where to find digital hip-hop EP's? I want the backing tracks and vocals split up, but ripping to Ableton Live from my turntables is a pain (and I am having trouble sourcing the records I want). Is there anywhere that does digital downloads of hip-hop vocal and backing tracks?

It's such a pain (and expensive) to source vinyl. Now that everyone seems to be switching over to this digital vinyl control stuff, where the hell are they downloading their tracks from?

backing track for guitar

edtut — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:11:19 -0800

whats the best hardware to use to set up a solo backing track when playing guitar? on you tube there is a john mayer vid where he plays justin timberlake to his own backing, and this j mascis vid below shows him set it up then switch it back on a few mins later. what is the best hardware to set up this effect? and how does one ensure the sound integrity when playing through a single amp?

Are IT band straps just snake oil?

middleclasstool — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:05:11 -0800

Are those IT band straps for running worth a damn? So, following bad knee pain after finishing my first marathon last month, I went to a physical medicine and rehab specialist, and the doc informs me that I have two guitar strings running down the outside of each leg. My IT bands, are, in her words, "the worst I've seen in a long time."

So I'm off the street and in the pool + aggressive physical therapy for a month or so. My question is this: I want to get back on the road when this is over doing everything I can to prevent this from flaring up again. I've read other AskMe threads on stretching and maintenance you can do to be good to your IT bands (good info, thanks), but I'm wondering about those straps some runners wear on their legs to keep IT band problems at bay.

Does anyone know/have any evidence that the effectiveness of these things is beyond placebo? Or is this just the runner's version of copper bracelets and magnetic necklaces? How comfortable are they at distance?

Is there a site to track showings of my to-see films?

jimmyjimjim — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:15:35 -0800

Is there a site that will enable me to compile a list of movies I want to see and notify me if any of them show in a configurable fairly wide area? Yahoo Movies lets me build a to-see list, but I have to laboriously plug in a bunch of zip codes for each film (because its range is very narrow). For example, I've only seen LOTR on DVD, and every once in a while a theater revives them as a special thing and I miss it. And, just generally, I'm interested in obscure indie flicks that release only sporadically, and I lack the patience to search each title every few days. Now.....if there were such a site that could do the above plus track showings of my top-predicted films at MOVIELENS, that'd be great (but way too much to hope for). FYI, movielens (movielens.umn.edu) is an awesome groupware prediction engine.

iPod keeps derailing

emelenjr — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:12:43 -0800

My old iPod is behaving badly. Is there something wrong with it or something wrong with the tracks I'm trying to play? I have a 40GB 3G iPod (the kind with the four touch-sensitive buttons above the wheel). The battery is already giving out--I know that much. But something weird is going on with a number of tracks on two albums I purchased from the iTunes store recently. That is, the iPod skips over those tracks. I'm not set to shuffle, I'm not in a playlist with those tracks missing.

Curiously, I was able to play the tracks in iTunes through my iPod (rather than using the iTunes library) so I'm inclined to think there's nothing wrong with the tracks that would make the iPod want to skip them.

What gives? Is this a common problem with aging iPods? I'm planning to upgrade eventually but, dammit, the tracks the iPod is skipping are good ones.

How to track joint finances?

gottabefunky — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:11:45 -0800

How can I and the soon-to-be-Mrs. start tracking our joint finances simultaneously on separate computers? She uses a laptop, I have a desktop and a laptop. I know we can just use Quicken on the desktop, but that would take some serious habit-reshaping, and we have enough of that coming up as it is.

Is there any sort of distributed-Quicken thing out there where we can track our finances separately, but end up with one file at the end of the year (which we can both modify along the way)? Maybe online? Network our computers?

Hurricane tracking reliability.

The Straightener — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:14:21 -0800

Has anyone tracked the historical accuracy of different types of hurricane trajectory prediction models? Each hurricane season I'm fascinated by storm plots like this. I understand that the different colors and their corresponding stock-tickerish names stand for the different sources of hurrican path predictions, but does anyone track the outcomes of hurricane paths to see if any one of these models is more often right than others?

iTunes added my new music tracks as podcast episodes, but doesn't show them under Podcasts -- how can I delete them?

chrismear — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 04:09:06 -0800

I added some new music tracks to iTunes, and for some reason it thought they were podcast episodes. So it doesn't show them under 'Music'. But it's not showing them in the 'Podcasts' library either. I've deleted the music files from the Finder, but how can I clear out the tracks from my iTunes library? Here's exactly what happened:

1. I dragged some MP3s into iTunes (these ones, to be precise).
2. iTunes copied them to my iTunes Library folder, and started playing them...
3. ...but I couldn't find them in 'Music'. I could only see them in my 'Unplayed tracks' smart playlist.
4. I looked for them in the Finder, and saw that iTunes had put them in the 'Podcasts' folder.
5. But, in the 'Podcasts' source in iTunes, they don't show up. (I'm guessing it's because the Podcasts view groups episodes by podcast, and since these tracks aren't attached to an actual podcast, it's not showing them.)
6. I deleted the files from the Finder, but obviously this doesn't remove them from the iTunes library -- they're still listed there, with the little exclamation mark icon next to them, indicating that the files are missing.

Because I can only see the tracks in a smart playlist, and not in a true source list, there's no 'Delete' option, so I can't figure out how to remove these orphaned tracks from my library. So how can I clean them up?

(I subsequently used the ID3 tag trick from this AskMe to successfully import the files into the 'Music' section, but I'm still left with a bunch of orphaned tracks from the failed first import that I'd like to get rid of.)

Looking for a sampler/looper/track recorder for OSX.

Chuck Cheeze — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:41:07 -0800

Looking for a sampler/looper/track recorder for OSX. I want to make my own version of Jay-Z's The Black Album using the Jay-Z construction set (yes I know we've had enough versions of TBA...) so I am looking for a program for OSX that i can feed MP3's into and grab segments, then loop, speed up/down, layer tracks, etc.

I don't think Garage Band works with MP3's and this sort of sampling, and I don't want something as heavy as Pro Tools.