Podcastplayer.org news

B.K. DeLong writes

one of the major things that’s been annoying me is the complete lack of proper ID3 name tag metadata in the MP3s that make up these podcasts

Amen. The sooner the podcasting community sees the value in sensible metadata, the sooner podcasts can become “first class citizens” of the internet, like web pages and emails.

Read more BrainStream: Note to Podcasters: Where’s your ID3-f00 ?, add sensible, meaningful ID3v2 metadata to your own podcasts, and petition your creation, distribution, searching, downloading, and playing software makers to properly support a wide range of tags.

And please don’t leave out my personal favourite: the PCNT “have I listened to this yet?” tag.

Here’s a more interesting idea than most of the “hey let’s set up a directory of podcasts” that seem to be springing up around the web. Let’s face it guys, those are just reinventing the likes of yahoo or dmoz - incomplete, and superseded by search.

Techpodcasts, on the other hand, seems to be attempting a tighter community of “affiliates” (which , as far as I can tell, seem to be more like “contributors” or “columnists” than affiliates in the usual web “click through me and I get a kickback” sense). The idea is that people can apply to become affiliates, and those that meet certain criteria on content, quality, and regularity get to join, and get listed.

The idea certainly seems reasonable. What worries me about techpodcasts in particular, though, is the very broad range of subject matter in the podcasts, and the apparent lack of easily browseable information about the feeds and the individual ‘casts. For example the current “affiliates” list is shown as:

Apple Logs
Digital Experience Podcast
eDave.org Security News
Geek News Central
Home Network Help
In the Trenches
Linux Log Podcast
Michael Lehman
Microsoft Log
Mondays
One Minute Tip .com
Software as She Developed
Tech Rag Tear Outs
The Brad Cast
The Chris Pirillo Show
The Feed
The MacCast
.Net Rocks
WebTalk Radio

Some of those give hints about typical content (the MacCast, Microsoft Log, .Net Rocks, Linux Log), but the rest could be anything that the site owners consider “tech” enough..

Personally, I’d like to know a bit more about a feed before I subscribe. I’m not at all interested in Mac-specific ramblings, for example, but stuff about cutting-edge OO and Agile software development would go in my podcatcher ASAP.

So, techpodcasts, for your “value add", please make finding out about the general content of feeds, and the specific content of ‘casts a painless (and maybe even pleasant) experience. Use your imagination, delight potential listeners.

Read more at www.techpodcasts.com - Home.

It looks like iPodder (probably the most popular podcatcher software) has released version 2. I’ve tried it out, and it does indeed have a bunch of major improvements:

1. + There’s much more click-though on visible details, you can easily get to and change feed properties
   - this only consist of the URL at the moment - no option to pause a feed, or apply any sort of filtering, or show accompanying blog posts/play notes, or view track metadata, or apply feed-specific scheduling, or enter user/password for an authenticated feed.

2. + The appearance is improved, with iTunes-like “stripey” lists, and (at last) a way to sort feeds
   - one of my favourite features, the big, easy, obvious, “add feed” box has been hidden, along with a move to a row of cryptic icons, with (apparently) no way of showing understandable text buttons instead.

3. + you can now click on a downloaded ‘cast to play it immediately
   - it can only play in iTunes or Windows media player. This is nonsense, I don’t tend to use either of those, preferring RealPlayer, or WinAmp, or VLC. Sure, allow me to select which type of playlist to generate, but don’t force me to use a particular player - the next version really must allow entry of an arbitrary path to a player as an “other” option.

4. + feed scanning and downloading is considerably faster and more controllable.
   - It seems to pick which ‘casts to download at random, though, I’d prefer at least some way to tell it which ones I want first, so I can listen to them while the others are still coming in.

5. + it tracks which ‘casts have been downloaded from a feed in a visible way, and allows you to select “back catalog” ‘casts for downloading along with the new stuff.
   - it doesn’t seem good at knowing the difference between tracks I have downloaded but moved out of my “incoming” area; and tracks I’ve never downloaded. Maybe that’s just because the previous version didn’t store enough data. I’ll see how I get on with this in use.

6. + best of all, I can now export/import and back up my feeds as (hopefully standard) OPML. w00t!

All in all, a definite improvement. If you use iPodder, then you should almost definately upgrade. Just remember to fully exit your old version, the installer (on Windows, at least) doesn’t seem to check, and gets in a tangle if the old one is still running.

Read more and download the latest version at iPodder, the cross-platform podcast receiver.

At last, a detailled and informative guide to recording podcasts on an iRiver MP3 player/recorder. I’ve been puzzling recently over how some people seem to be able to just connect a microphone to their MP3 player and record stuff, where I can’t seem to get things working without a separate (and relatively bulky) pre-amp or mixer.

Looks like the iRiver 700 series contains a tiny pre-amp, and deep in the configurations, you can manually set the input jack to act as “line in” or “mic in". I haven’t found such a config in my EZAV player yet, so I assume mine always acts as “line in".

Just a shame that the config and recording process on the iRiver is so fiddly. On mine its as simple as press the dedicated record button to start, press it again to stop. It autodetects line-in or the built-in mic, records high-bit-rate stereo from line-in, and lower-rate mono from the built-in mic, and records without complaint until the drive is full.

Read more at: Geekfishing Blog: iRiver iFP-799 Recording