Technology to the rescue!

A friend of my wife is married to an Egyptian, and he just bought a new car.  New car doesn’t have a cassette player.

So he asked me to transfer some of his favorite tapes of Abdel Halim Hafez (and others) to USB stick for him. I said sure no problem, I’m set up to do that sort of thing.

But I hadn’t counted on one thing.

All of the cassette credits and titles are in Arabic script.  How do I label the files on the USB?  I thought perhaps I could find these releases online, in like Discogs, and identify them that way.  Nope.

I thought perhaps I could use Google Translate to give me the English equivalents.  Nope.  And I can’t figure out how to type the text I want translated.

Finally, I tried Shazam, which identifies music by listening to it and comparing some sort of algorithm.  Yay!  This works.

The internationalism of the interwebs continues to amaze me.

I had a program on my iPhone that identified music. It worked quite well.

I would dearly love to see the architecture and source code for that program.

Apparently the transliteration from one language to the other is inexact. In one source, a song is called "Bahlam Beek," in another it's "Bahlam Biik."

The track I just finished is labeled as "3oqbalak Youm Meladak." Really?

The artist is variously listed as Abdel Halim Hafez, Abd El Salim Hafez, Abdel Hasim Hafez, Abdel-Haleem Hafez, or several other variations.

Another singer with a cassette in here is Ragheb Alame.

“Ragheb” really?  Really?

His name is spelled "Alame" on the cassette cover -- the ONLY thing on there in Roman letters -- but all the online references to this singer say his name is Ragheb Sobhi Alama (Arabic: راغب علامة‎ born June 7, 1962).

This part's probably true though:

Quote :

He was born into a shiite family