Podcastplayer.org news

The radio in my car is pretty much rubbish. A bulk-standard AM/FM/Cassette head unit. No CD, No MP3. Nothing useful for podcasts unless I go to the considerable trouble of recording them onto cassette tape (yikes, does anyone do that?)

So, just like so many others, I resort to litening using headphones and a portable player. But it’s uncomfortable and irritating when driving.

To solve this problem, I’ve been looking around for a while for a “car stereo” which works better with the podcasts I want to listen to. I’ve seen several with MP3-CD support, but that’s only a little bit less clumsy than burning to tape. I’ve seen a few with either a front-mounted audio input or a SD/MMC slot, but these are usually “high end” devices costing more than I want to pay.

So you can imagine that I was particularly impressed to see that (in the UK at least) budget supermarket chain ALDI are offering a low-cost head unit for just £49.99 which offers CD-MP3, SD/MMC slot and (best of all) a regular USB connection so (presumably) I can plug in any USB mass-storage device such as an MP3 player, “thumb drive", or maybe even a USB hard drive.

No details about things like how much power the built-in USB port supplies, which USB profiles it really works with, or which of the many USB plug standards the USB port supports.

I definately plan to go in and take a look at one when they get stocks in on 22nd December!

Read more at: ALDI: Car CD/MP3 Radio

Update: looks like there are several of these on sale on eBay, too:

Laura Swisher lost her Minidisc recorder, and posted looking for suggestions on a replacement for use in podcasting. There’s already a few comments with various suggestions, but I’m sure she’d appreciate the views of a few podcastplayer.org readers.

Personally, I think she’d be nuts to get anything other than a good medium-cost flash recorder. There are a lot of people doing podcasts on iRiver flash devices, and I love my little 512MB EZAV. I can imagine that old, slow, heavy, power-hungry, short-duration, moving-parts-and-noise from-motors technology like minidisc or tape would be any sort of cometitor to a sleek modern flash recorder, but it will be interesting to see how she gets on.

I hope she posts a followup to let us know.

Read more at: Swisher’s Untitled Blog Project: Where My Geeks At?

It’s just so hard to get concrete details about a portable MP3 player beforebuying it. Over at CNet reviews, some people seem to be having problems playing files bigger than a few MB. That would blow a player out of the water for listening to podcasts. It might be wise to steer clear of the Samsung YP-MT6 if podcasts is your thing.

I’ve just bought a Samsung yp-mt6 and was very impressed with it until I ran into this problem: I record mostly classical music, and the first of several movements of one piece in mp3 format is slightly over 9mb in size. Whenever I try to get the player to play that track, it shuts down automatically and restarts. Another track of 6mb, however, will play. So I wonder if anyone has run into this problem, knows the cause, and possibly a solution?

Read more at samsung yp-mt6: mp3 file size limit?

California startup LA Pro Foil claim they have developed an effective, low-cost way of getting a lifelike"surround” effect from any recorded sound source (such as an iPod or generic MP3 player).

While investigating the properties of our patented low-profile Pro Foil ™ capacitive transmission surface, it became apparent that the non-linear phase distribution characteristics that were limiting its effect as a network platform had a very interesting effect. Audio-frequency signals decompose and distribute across the surface according to the phase characteristics with which they reached the recording microphone, and disperse their energy at an equivalent distance from the sound input to the material.

Recording an audio signal using even a low-cost microphone preserves these important phase characteristics. A simple amplification process is all that is needed to drive a sheet of Pro Foil ™. Current prototypes have relatively low power characteristics, and need to be placed close to the listener’s head for best effect.

Sounds an excellent way to get the most from podcast “soundseeing” recordings.

Read more at : News Shark: LA Pro Foil breaks surround sound barrier

Last week I picked up a new PlayStation Portable (PSP) in the hopes that I could use FeedDemon to download podcasts and other audio files to it. Turns out it’s possible, but it wasn’t as straightforward as I would’ve liked

Read more at: Nick Bradbury: Download audio to your PlayStation Portable (PSP) with FeedDemon

There’s not a lot about it on the web site, just a few notes about the release and a download, but “Sparks!” from Blogmatrix claims to be an integrated download/listen/create/upload tool for podcasters. I’ll download it, have a go, and report back in a few days.

In the meanwhile, read more at BlogMatrix.com Sparks!

As well as a podcast fan, I’m also a software developer, with a particular interest in the Java programming language and platform. So I was delighted to find that there is active development of podcast software in my favourite language.

jPodder is an ambitious project which hopes to be not just a podcatcher in the vein of iPodder and Doppler, but also a player and media manager, and even a podcast creation tool with MP3 and ID3 editing, RSS creation and upload facilities.

It’s not quite reached a “1.0″ release, but it’s well worth a look. Checkout jPodder Podcasting.

They have a development blog, although they seem to have recently reorganized things, so the links in the RSS (at bloglines, at least) are shot.

I’ve been downloading podcasts for a while, now. I’ve been using iPodder and Doppler to grab a wide range of feeds, and they quickly start filling up disk space. As I work through listening to this heap of podcasts, one problem becomes more and more significant. How do I track what I have listened to? (and how do I avoid listening to things more than once?)

Both these tools create a file structure with one folder per feed, and just dump whatever ‘casts they grab into the appropriate folder. When I decide to update the files I carry around, I look through the player and delete any that I have heard, then select some from the files on the PC to add to the player.

This seems OK, until you consider the problem of tracking which particular episodes of which feeds have been listened to, and which haven’t. Every podcaster uses a different approach to naming, so the names are no particular help. Datestamps on the files are those of the download, rather than the creation, of the ‘cast which may not be very useful for ordering. Doppler, for example, has the strange behaviour of downloading episodes from a new feed in reverse order!.

For a while I tried setting up a parallel folder structure - one half for incoming new ‘casts, and one half for the ones that have been listened to. Moving things across is manual and fiddly, though.

As time goes on, I lean more in favour of tracking this kind of information with media metadata. Imagine a processing step in the podcatcher software that sets some kind of MP3 metadata “listened” field to “never” on download. Players and/or transfer tools can then set this item to a timestamp when the file is actually listened to. It should be relatively simple to build a “podcast browser” which (by default) only shows unlistened ‘casts. A player option to delete listened ‘casts as soon as they are played would seem a useful complement to this approach.

Is this a sensible idea? have I missed something obvious? All suggestions (and implementations) welcome.

Alison Fish writes about experiences of listening to podcasts using iTunes without an iPod. A Fish: Podcasting without an iPod: Tiffany Shlain, iTunes

I hope (if she continues) that she will have more luck listening to podcasts with iTunes than I did. I’ve uninstalled it now. I’m still looking for a good podcast listening solution.

One important thing about podcasts that I found out soon after starting is that it’s irritating to find you are listening to one you have already heard. iTunes has a flag that indicates whether (and when) a track was listened to (good), but I could not find any way to manually set this flag (bad). I have a fairly extensive collection of podcasts, some of which I have already listened to. I loaded my collection into iTunes and it effectively wanted me to listen to them all again in order to set the flag. This seems crazy.

I also object to the way that iTunes installed monitoring software that runs all the time, eating CPU cycles and memory, even without an iPod, and the way it greedily claimed lots of filetypes for itself, despite the presence of at least half a dozen other media players on my system.

The final nail in the coffin was that it seemed to provide absolutely no support for any other form of MP3 player other than an iPod, so I was still left dragging and dropping podcast files from the iTunes repository to my generic portable MP3 player, and (guess what) still not getting that crucial “it’s been listened to” flag set.

Sigh.

About.com has a guide to buying MP3 players. Unfortunately it’s targetted much more at imagined pop music listeners than podcast listeners (and certainly not toward people who might want to record as well as listen.) I’m also slightly worried by the wooliness and inaccuracy of some of the information. For example the article states:

The first type of connection option, known as USB, is the more common one found today and is something supported by both PCs and Macs. It is also somewhat slower in regards to how quickly it transfers music from your computer to the player then the other standard, FireWire. FireWire however, is primarily supported only on Macs.

That’s somewhat disingenuous, as it fails to differentiate between more important speed considerations. Sure, USB1 is relatively slow, but USB2 and Firewire are effectively equivalent - they are both faster than any media player (that I know of) can transfer. And the article fails to mention that flash storage is almost always slower than hard drive storage.

Fundamentally an MP3 player good for listening to a bunch of short music tracks, is not the same as an MP3 player good for listening to podcasts, is not the same as an MP3 player used for listening to long, detailled classical pieces, is not the same as an MP3 player used for a mix of playing and recording, and so on. Any article that fails to even acknowledge such differences, let alone differentiate between different needs and features, is only of limited use.

Oh, and the article tried to open a pop-up.

Read the article at MP3 Players Buying Guide

Still looking around at good devices for listening to, and recording my own, podcasts. I found a mini-review of one at Webfeed Central - My New Toy

I bought an iRiver, yesterday. Not the really good, expensive one, but the iFP-190TC. Ever since I got it, i’ve been putting it through the normal tests of recording everything, all the time. I found a few places where I can’t use it, due to the ambient noise, but I learned a lot
. . .
I really like this thing. I can record up to about 18 hours on the lowest setting, and a hefty 4.5 hours at the highest setting. The internal mic is really sensitive and sounds good. That’s pretty important, because there is no input jacks on it. There is one rattling moving part that will get the super glue (or something) real soon. The eye that the lanyard connects to swivels. NOT a good idea for something that only has an internal mic.

Excellent! More people pushing the assumptions about podcasts. This is not your grandma’s radio.

As promised in Sunday night’s audio post, here is also a recording of the rain [9MB MP3], as heard from my home in L.A. Now why on Earth would anyone want to hear that? Beats me - I just enjoy the sound of rain. Perhaps somebody’ll want to use it as sound effects for their own podcast, or play it in the background while you’re making love

Listen to this, and more, at Something that Happened

One of the reasons I started this site in the first place was to explore how well the current generation of Mp3 players support listening to podcasts, and what suggestions people have for improvements to data formats, player software, and player hardware.

As well as a wide range of PC-based players, I currently own two portable MP3 players. I don’t really consider either of the portable players really suitable for listening to podcasts, and their limitations are beginning to seriously grate. Logically enough, I’m now in the position of looking for a new player. And I’m both boggled by the huge range of available players, and stumped by how hard it is to find out if they are really suitable for podcasti playing.

I’ll say at the outset that I have little or no interest in listening to music. Even the popular Coverville podcast is too much music for my taste. I typically listen to podcasts in chunks of about 15 minutes each, so a player that picks up where I left off is vital. I’m also quite keen on using it for recording ad-hoc podcasts, so some form of microphone (built-in or pluggable) is highly desirable, too.

So, what players do other people use? How do they stack up for playing podcasts? I would love to hear from anyone with an opinion or suggestions.

Many thanks in advance

Here’s another Flash podcast player. This one’s smarter than most - it allows you to choose “playlists” each containing several podcast feeds, then scroll through a list of feeds to play. It’s got that smooth Flash look to it, and it’s a reasonable and simple way to listen to podcasts if (a) you don’t mind waiting by your computer and (b) you don’t want to keep a copy.

It’s got play/pause and track skip, but it still doesn’t seem to support any kind of advanced navigation or bookmarking within a ‘cast, and by taking this route you miss out on any accompanying notes that may have been provided in an accompanying blog article.

To fully enjoy what podcasting is all about do you think you need an iPod. I would say not. Preseting PODCAST JUKEBOX !!! A one of its kind where in your can tune into recently updated 100 podcasting events right here. So get your headphones ready and sit back and relax.

Podcast Jukebox @ Search 4 RSS :: The RSS Engine

I’ve seen this reported in several places now:

About one in ten American adults now use a portable MP3 player, pushing the potential audience for podcasts up to over 22 million in the US alone.

A recent poll of Internet users by Pew/Internet found that 11% of American adults have iPods or other MP3 players. Pew suggests that there are several million more MP3 players owned by teens, who were not surveyed.

This is an interesting report, but I’m wary of the casual way that it seems to equate owning an MP3 player with being a potential audience for podcasts. I’m sure these people count as a potential audience for downloaded music tracks, but as I point out at my main web site, most MP3 players are decidedly unsuitable for playing podcasts. Worse than that, though, is that it’s almost impossible to find out whether a particular player is a shining podcast star, or a dull black hole.

Based on my experience, most of the people surveyed would probably find podcasts so clumsy to transfer, play, and listen to that they’d give up and go back to their pirated pop songs.

Read more at: Podcasting News: Portable Media Player Audience Balloons to 22 Million

Want to read RSS feeds and listen to podcasts on your Palm device? This looks like a fairly neat bit of software which claims “podcast support".

Unfortunately, it seems that the “podcast support” is really only support for recognizing RSS enclosures in the RSS reader. From the manual:

In order to store downloaded Audio enclosures (MP3s, etc), you must have a memory card installed. Files will be stored on this card, and can be listened to with a third-party player. The Audio window in preferences allows you to make these selections.

Hardly what I’d call “podcast support". Could it be that they spotted a bandwagon rolling by, and wanted a piece of the action?

The product site is at: Stand Alone, Inc. - Handheld Software

Mike Manual at Media Guerilla likes the idea of podcasting, but (like so many of us) gets frustrated by the podcast listening experience. The focus of this particular complaint is on the lack of indexed content:

While I enjoy the show I’ll admit, I haven’t yet found religion with podcasting. IMO the technology still has some obstacles to overcome before it can become a solid communication tool. The fact that it’s a one-way medium and expensive to produce are things I can live with, but my biggest gripe is this – the lack of indexed content.

At the moment there’s no way to easily digest a podcast, you’re basically stuck listening to the entire thing. The latest H&H Report runs about 45 mins long, so you better have the time to listen or face the alternative of hit-and-miss dialing on your iPod. And don’t ask me how to earmark something you found interesting other than just joting down the time stamp. It’s just frustrating. I will, however, give credit to Neville and Shel for including show notes with their podcasts, it really helps. It appears that this is becoming more of a common practice among regular podcasters.

In the comments, Shel Holtz offers more player suggestions:

As far as time-shifted radio goes, I love podcasting. I listen to half a dozen podcasts, some daily, and I’m hooked. For convenience’s sake, though, I’d like devices you can bookmark so you can return to a show right where you left it and that have WiFi built in (so podcasts can go straight to the device). The wish list among other, more seasoned podcasters is longer, but I’d settle for that right now.

Sure, show notes are a neat idea, but producing them is so fiddly. If podcasting is really going to work (in the way that blogging works) it will need good, comfortable, tool support for this sort of stuff. Creation tools need some sort of automatic “scene detection” (like all the entry-level video editing software has), simple roll-and-click annotation of sections, and support for generating some kind of standardised metadata. Distribution and player technology needs to include support for passing through and displaying/interacting with this metadata.

More and more I’m coming to the view that the key to a podcasting breakthough is work on some sort of standardised but flexible metadata to accompany each podcast on its travels.

Read the article at: Media Guerrilla: The Hobson & Holtz Report, Report

I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff queued up to say about how clumsy, unergonomic and primitive current approaches to listening to podcasts are, and some thoughts and suggestions about how we might improve the whole experience. In the meanwhile, though, take a look at the Daisy Consortium. They are coming from a different direction (making sense of audio books for people who have trouble with written/printed ones), but they are already facing many of the same problems that may soon threaten to swamp podcasting.

Check out their site at the DAISY Consortium Web site

One of my clients has been having a lot of trouble with his office PC, and I spent pretty much all of yesterday trying to get data off it before it gives up completely. I’m still not sure what prompted the coollapse in the first place - it might have been malicious software, or it might have been just a hard drive failure.

The symptoms were twofold. First, Windows (in this case Windows 2000 SP2) would fail to boot most times, giving a blue-screen and complaining about a variety of missing system files and dlls. On the odd occasion that it would boot all the way to the login screen, it simply would not recpgnize any of the user/password pairs that usually work on that machine. Without any login at all, most rescue attempts are stumped.

In this case, the machine had an extra hard drive installed (supposedly for backups :-) ). I installed another copy of the OS on that drive, which would allow a login, and rescued the bulk of my clients files. The biggest problem was with stored email. My client prefers to use “incredimail” for his email needs. Incredimail is well-known for the vice-like grip it keeps on its data, refusing to store it in an accessible form, and requiring an “export” operation to even move email to a new machine or upgraded OS. That can be a problem when the old incredimail installation won’t run from the new OS drive. I spent quite a while trying different approaches until I found IncrediConvert.

IncrediConvert is a really neat third-party tool that delves into Incredimail’s weird file structure and extracts all the messages as more-portable “.eml” files. It preserves the stored folder structure and is a real lifesaver if you have a dead incredimail installation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do so good a job with the incredimail address book, but at least that’s almost plain text.

Has all this got anything to do with podcasting? Indirectly, yes. My client has recently been collecting audio interviews and thoughts on his new Olympus DM-10 Digital Voice Recorder and Music Player. I love this device. I’ve not had much to do with portable voice recorders for a few years, and this new crop of digital machines are smooth and easy to use for recording, and simply appear as a removable drive containing pre-built MP3 files when plopped in to a little USB cradle. The usability of a purpose-built voice recorder is so much better than the MP3 players with recording ability that I’ve seen. I can’t justify getting one at the moment, but it sure is tempting.

Anyway, all his hard-won audio content was also stuck on the inaccessible PC, so that’s all got to be fetched off too. I’m hoping to get my client set up with a RSS podcast feed for some of this material soon, but in the meanwhile you can hear one of his very first recordings on the new machine on his web site (look for the image of a microphone and “a word from the coach", near the bottom of the page).