I’ve been very interested in what Adam Curry is doing lately, promoting the ‘iPod Platform’ as it’s being called, though I have no iPod, I still get involved here, as does Dave Slusher at evilgeniuschronicles.org
While these guys are both from the world of radio, I have very little radio experience, only appearing as a guest a few times many years ago. What I do have a background in is publishing – of all sorts – from print, to music, and stuff in-between, so while I’ve got a face for radio, and a voice for the written word, that’s not gonna stop me.
I’ve released renko, which is similar to Adam’s iPodder script, and Dave’s get_enclosures.pl script. I’ve been using similar scripts and cron jobs for almost a year to download some web-radio shows, and doing the RSS enclosure thing when it started happening. This is code that is slightly cleaned up and made fit for human consumption. (Or so I hope!) grab renko if you wish. You’ll need Perl, and if all goes right, you won’t have to install any modules. It’s a proof-of-concept rather than a finished application. It’s got many missing features, but it’s a start. Hopefully it’ll help kickstart this revolution.
(Honestly, I think NetNewsWire could kick butt in this area, it’s a Mac OS X application that could tie directly into iTunes quite easily, and Brent could do it all with a great interface… Brent, you listening?)
Oh, both Adam and Dave wondered about enclosures in Atom and assumed Atom must have something similar, but every time I ask, no one seems to have a good answer. Maybe this will help poke the Atom folks a bit.
I started doing some audio experiments, and if you wanna keep up to date, just subscribe to the feed at http://rasterweb.net/raster/feeds/rwaudio.rss with renko, or one of the other enclosure aware aggregators and see what happens. I used Audacity for the most recent version, and it’s improved a bit since I last used it. (Noise reduction helps quite a bit!) Audacity is open-source, so that helps lower the barrier to creating the audio, though I know it’s still not the software Adam is looking for…
Anyway, that’s it for now, must run!
Update: renko is here.