audio

I have not really written much about this podcasting thing, and believe me, I could write volumes… I’ve been experimenting with the concept for years and years now. It’s nice that the tools to make it easy are starting to show up…

Adam has got iPodder.org as sort of a hub for this “iPodder platform” and podcasting stuff, which is really starting to catch on. Many of my old scripts to automagically download content are no longer needed as RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures are starting to appear.

This is all just the beginning. Sure, I’ve got my “little” stuff over in the Audio section, but I’m not really pushing it, I’m more of a kickstarter, and things have been sufficiently kicked…

Just today I was discussing VoIP with someone and they said that their office phone system, which uses VoIP, sends you your voicemail as an email with a wav file attached. Sounds nice, but why not provide an RSS feed of your voicemail with enclosures, so you could sync your iPod as you run out the door, and listen to all of your voicemail on the go. Crazy idea? Maybe…. The point is, there are many applications we might not have thought of yet.

There’s getting to be more daily shows/audioblogs now, and my time is being stretched. (I currently drive about 90 minutes a day and really don’t want that to increase!) I wonder how this will work. Will there be just a few well known shows? Will people shorten their shows? I mean, in 1997 there were a handful of weblogs, and you could read them all during your lunch break, but now we use aggregators to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and we always have new content, and we rely on being pointed to the good stuff. Perhaps as more people listen we’ll just get into the mode of hitting the episodes that interest us. It’s an interesting problem. I won’t get into the audio/search/metadata thingy right now, as that’s something for another time.

Thank you, and goodnight…

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.